Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: 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.

Table of Contents

Part I. Python Programming Basics
Chapter 1. Python Basics
Chapter 2. Flow Control
Chapter 3. Functions
Chapter 4. Lists
Chapter 5. Dictionaries and Structuring Data
Chapter 6. Manipulating Strings

Part II. Automating Tasks
Chapter 7. Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions
Chapter 8. Reading and Writing Files
Chapter 9. Organizing Files
Chapter 10. Debugging
Chapter 11. Web Scraping
Chapter 12. Working with Excel Spreadsheets
Chapter 13. Working with PDF and word Documents
Chapter 14. Working with CSV Files and JSON Data
Chapter 15. Keeping Time, Scheduling Tasks, and Launching Programs
Chapter 16. Sending Email and Text Messages
Chapter 17. Manipulating Images
Chapter 18. Controlling the Keyboard and Mouse with GUI Automation

Appendix A. Installing Third-Party Modules
Appendix B. Running Programs
Appendix C. Answers to the Practice Questions