Automate the Boring Stuff

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

The second edition is available on October 29th! See what's new.

"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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