Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition: 75 Python automation recipes for web scraping; data wrangling; and Excel, report, and email processing

Disclaimer: The publisher asked me to review this book and gave me a review copy. I promise to be 100% honest in how I feel about this book, both the good and the less so.OverviewThis book is intended for someone who wants to automate some tasks, but may not be an overly technical person. They may have a Python background, but not necessarily so. They may be developers, but don't have to be. They just need to get something done, and don't want to keep doing it by hand.What I Like:This is a wide ranging book that gives the reader an opportunity to learn about libraries and techniques that they probably haven't seen before. Each section, or recipe, is set up the same. It starts with Getting Ready, which lists the required libraries, their version, and the command to set it up. Next is How To Do It, which gives the code. The code is, of course, available through the Packt website, as it is for any book with code. Then we have How It Works, which changes back to a more conversational tone and talks through the code example. The fourth section is There's More, which gives you a few tips to extend what was just taught. Each recipe finishes up with See Also, where you see what other recipes are related to the current one. This standard structure makes it easy to read through a recipe and focus on what you need.What I Don't Like:The title of this section is probably a little too strong. It would be better to say, What I Don't Prefer. However, this is how I've been organizing these reviews, and that's what I'l stick with for now.So what I don't prefer are the last few sections. Chapter 11 is about using machine learning. Anyone who has been following my book reviews knows that I love machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence. This chapter, though, uses Google Cloud, which is an entirely different beast than what has been discussed. Machine learning itself is a skill to be learned, as is Google Cloud. It also sticks out as the only section in the book that uses anything from Google. I personally would have preferred to learn about using Python with Google Drive products, such as Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Sites. Many people use these technologies, and would probably welcome automating using them. Thankfully, the author finishes up with testing and debugging, which a less technical person will probably need.What I Would Like to See:Given how useful I tend to find cookbooks, I would like to see more recipes. As you would expect from having personal expectations, there are plenty of recipes that I don't think I'll need. But do I still gain value from them? Yes. It gives me an idea of what is possible that I haven't thought about yet. Maybe I'll need them one day. Or maybe I can use this book to guide someone else who has a question. It's a good reference book for a library all around.I can easily give this book a 5 out of 5. It is very useful with both the specific recipes as well as how they are organized. I would be very happy to see more books like this from Packt and would like to thank the author for this one.

Really appreciate any book that starts off driving home the importance of setting virtual environments properly. Yes, a lot of information now days can be searched online, but if you are here, you are willing to chip in a little for a fresh set of neatly laid out concepts – and this book is just that. It is a great compilation of relatable example driven concepts. Regular expression, argument parsing, logging, directory manipulation, reading txt/pdf/image/csv/word/excel files are all bread and butter now days and if any of these topics daunted you, this book gives you a nice high-level intro into them. The web sections were great for me who has really only scrapped the web, I was exposed to other ideas such as automated emails and text messages. Although you don’t have to read the book chapter by chapter, I would have preferred to put the testing section up front to drive test driven development home a bit more. Overall it was a great read – thanks for collecting these ideas/examples and contributing back to the python community!

The book contains many ideas about how Python can help automate repeated computer tasks. Some chapters cover interesting topics (web scraping, file management, creating graphs, machine learning) by covering the basics and then incrementally building to more advanced tasks. Aside from automation, I also learned more about other computer ideas/concepts such as writing in Markdown, file encryption, and machine learning on the cloud.Overall, it can prove useful for people looking to streamline repeated computer tasks or even beginner Python programmers as a way to be introduced to various libraries.

This book has a lot of information. First it shows you how to set up a Python environment for automation, including installing Python, setting up cron jobs to run your tasks on schedule, and adding notifications so you can get details on your jobs delivered to your email.And then it gets interesting. This book differs slightly from other cookbooks I have read that just list a bunch of small coding examples to do specific things. These recipes build on each other and can be mixed and matched to automate a process you are doing manually.The topics covered are web scraping, file processing, report generation, spreadsheet manipulation, data processing and cleaning, graph and chart generation, communication, marketing automation, machine learning, code testing and debugging. You will definitely find enough examples here to automate any process you may have and free up time.

This book is very, very, basic, just from skimming it. It's more useful as a check list for little every day things that you can automate than an authoritative reference on automation in Python. If you are real beginner at Python you'll find it useful for some quick automation win's.In terms of price it's actually really expensive to pay even the 17-18 dollars for what you get. Don't bother getting a hard copy. After thumbing through it I was a little disappointed that I paid so much for it. Regardless, it's in my library now so i'll just have to live with it.

The explanation is not very clear. This is clearly not a book for a beginner in Python. Most of the stuff mentioned here will be easily available in a google search and the book doesn't add value to that search. The biggest drawback however was the price - extremely high.