Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

The author does a great job of presenting the python language in an easy to read and approchable manner. I am really enjoying this book and have learned a lot. Before starting this book I knew nearly nothing about python and programming, but this book has helped to supplement my knowledge.

Received fast. Great book.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is an easy-to-read and quick-to-apply Python book with many practical program examples. Thanks, Al!I didn't do any programming other than simple automation shell scripts after graduation. This summer, I wanted to help my interns build a new MVP (minimum viable product). I was keen to develop some automation tools to help my customers control their cameras. I am glad that I took action to learn and code in Python!I was lucky to find "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python"! The book cover is eye-catching. The preface is clear about what readers can achieve from the book. The code examples and quizzes are very useful and practical, such as how to find information using Regular Expressions, send text messages with Twilio, and draw text on images. I applied them to build my first Python-based MVP!Programming is a creative activity. I am happy to create Python tools to help me automate boring and very boring tasks! I want to go further! I continue my Python journey with "Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python"!

This book is intended for beginners, and really breaks down python in a very approachable manner. Despite that being said, I wouldn't recommend this book to a beginner. In the preface, the author mentions that this book uses many bad habits (or at the very least frowned upon habits), which is true. Many of coding examples are inefficient (which, to the author's credit, he acknowledges), and while the code might run, it's not going to be pretty. The projects look worthwhile, and those alone would be what I'd argue makes the book worth it. Many novice developers (as well as intermediate & advanced) can shrug off the idiosyncrasies that are presented in this book, but a person brand new to coding would likely misunderstand the material, ultimately leading to bad habits that'll be harder to unlearn.For a true beginner, I'd recommend the Python Crash Course book by the same publisher (No Starch Press). The fundamentals are clearly presented, and easy to understand. The foundation developed will be stronger, and you'll be less likely to develop bad habits, since most of the material is presented in a manner consistent with the python community (PEP).For example, the way variables and input functions are utilized between the two books are drastically different. In this book, user input and assignment is handled as follows:print('What's your name?')name = input()This is inefficient, and somewhat confusing, given that the alternative (as presented in Python Crash Course) is easier. In Python Crash Course, the same outcome is presented as follows:name = input("What is your name? ")The print statement asking for the user's name is excessive. If I'm trying to automate the boring stuff, I'm trying to trim the fat - not eat it.

I bought this as required course material for my college course. As someone with zero computer programming experience, it has been invaluable to quickly learn the basic concepts of Python. The practical applications made me personally excited about learning Python. I'm still reading through it and look forward to reading what Al has to teach. I've even substituted some time I typically block out for video games to study this instead!6 weeks into studying basic concepts in chapter 1-6 and chapter 13 on working with MS Excel using OpenPyXL and I've already written a program that automates a major task at work saving me and my co-workers several hours each a week.If you don't know anything about Python, please buy this book. I love that it's available free online to anyone which makes me even more willing to support buying this paperback copy.

I have six books from this company now, three on Linux and three on Python. All are excellent additions to any library. The material they present continues to be easy to understand with every new book I buy from them. Coding is NOT easy, there's a lot of stuff to learn and tons that you've got to commit to memory. These books make the process enjoyable, and they use practical examples that make it a lot easier to understand things like the flow of logic within statements.Allow me to give a little context: I started with computers in the 80's when I was a kid. BASIC was all I had access to, fun, but not a great start. My first PC came along and I learned DOS, despite the mostly crappy documentation. Linux came along at the end of the 90's and, while it was a great OS back then, documentation held it back on the desktop. Best I could do was get it to boot, so Windows was the only choice for a couple decades.Flash forward to the present, and I've ditched Windows completely, picked up a couple books (I don't yet own a book on Linux NOT published by No Starch) and I do better now with Linux than I ever did with Windows. Linux documentation quality is also light-years beyond what it was in the 90's, too. I spent a month on Mint and went straight to Arch. Things have changed THAT much.