Automate the Boring Stuff with Python





By Al Sweigart. Free to read under a Creative Commons license

"The best part of programming is the triumph of seeing the machine do something useful. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python frames all of programming as these small triumphs; it makes the boring fun."

- Hilary Mason, Founder of Fast Forward Labs and Data Scientist in Residence at Accel

"I'm having a lot of fun breaking things and then putting them back together, and just remembering the joy of turning a set of instructions into something useful and fun, like I did when I was a kid."

- Wil Wheaton, WIL WHEATON dot NET

Practical programming for total beginners.

If you've ever spent hours renaming files or updating hundreds of spreadsheet cells, you know how tedious tasks like these can be. But what if you could have your computer do them for you?

In Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, you'll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand-no prior programming experience required. Once you've mastered the basics of programming, you'll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation to:

Search for text in a file or across multiple files

Create, update, move, and rename files and folders

Search the Web and download online content

Update and format data in Excel spreadsheets of any size

Split, merge, watermark, and encrypt PDFs

Send reminder emails and text notifications

Fill out online forms

Step-by-step instructions walk you through each program, and practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks.

Don't spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do. Even if you've never written a line of code, you can make your computer do the grunt work. Learn how in Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

Udemy Online Video Course

The Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming online course on Udemy covers most of the content of the book. If you'd prefer a video format for learning to program, you can use this link to get a 70% discount. You will have lifetime access to the course content and can post questions to the course's forums.

You can preview the first 15 of the course's 50 videos on YouTube for free.

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Table of Contents

(Read the 1st edition.)

Additional Content

About the Author

Al Sweigart is a software developer and teaches programming to kids and adults. He has written several books for beginners, including Scratch Programming Playground, Cracking Codes with Python, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, and Making Games with Python & Pygame