Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Practical Programming for Total Beginners
by Al Sweigart · first published 2015
93% recommend6% neutral1% critical
Why HN recommends it
Practical, project-driven Python intro for total beginners and non-programmers: teaches basics through real tasks like Excel, PDFs, email, files and regex. Free online, and good for saving time at work.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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, u
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…Kernel Development 3rd Edition To get a nice general overview and get up and going quickly: [5] How Linux works: What every superuser should know [6] The Linux Command Line [7] Python Crash Course [8] Automate the boring stuff with Python. This is a great book to help you think about how to automate most of the repetitive things you will end up doing on a regular basis. [0] https://www.amazon.com/RHCSA-RHCE-Red-Enterprise-Linux/dp/14...…
on “Ask HN: Best Resources to Learn to Manage Linux Boxes via SSH” ↗Also, Al Sweigart makes available many of his books for free on his website, including "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python", which also has a lot of good reviews on Amazon. http://inventwithpython.com/index.html
on “Half-price Ebooks for Day Against DRM” ↗My younger brother is in the same age range. He was interested in programming, so I pointed him towards Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. He has done well since, with his latest project being a simple mouse-wiggler script that sets his status to "online" for his school's mandatory online attendance checks. Looking back at the learning…
on “Ask HN: Teaching Python to 16 yo as their first PL. Fun projects to get started?” ↗For what it's worth: Al Sweigart's "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" is pretty nice, and it's a good one for lending out to colleagues who show interest in learning Python (especially those poor souls with tedious jobs...).
on “Legally Free Python Books List” ↗Specifically "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" is my favourite Al Sweigart book.
on “Ask HN: Books that teach programming by building a series of small projects?” ↗…(https://smile.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Absolute-Beginne...) has you make a game at the end of every chapter with the concepts you've learned so far. I've bought this book for a number of people, though perhaps Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1593275994/) is better if you don't want to make games.
on “Ask HN: Books that teach programming by building a series of small projects?” ↗I mean, so far, its helped make things a bit easier for me to understand. I've also read "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" by Al Sweigart, which as someone with a non-CS background, I found very helpful, even when going back as a reference.
on “Ask HN: What are you reading Feb 2024” ↗Automate the boring stuff with Python
on “Ask HN: Books that teach programming by building a series of small projects?” ↗In a recent humble bundle, I found Automate the Boring Stuff with Python [0] which partially answers this. After going through the basics of Python, it describes building small projects such as scanning an Excel spreadsheet and sending email to people who are marked as 'not paid'. Projects like this give a different perspective to programming. Programming is not only about building grand projects.
on “"I know how to program, but I don't know what to program"” ↗I am looking for practical programming books. Think "Practical Common Lisp", "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" or "Ruby on Rails Tutorial". These examples happen to be freely available online, but I am looking for free or paid options for the following languages/frameworks: Clojure, Go, Rust, C#, React, Flask,…
on “Ask HN: What are good practical programming books?” ↗Beyond lawcomic[1], what is a good resource for this? If a lawyer wants to learn enough python to create a script that joins PDFs together, they can pick up a copy of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python[2] of the law. If an engineer wants to answer a question like “The IRS and HMRC consider these stock options to have a specific tax status if an employee exercised them within 90 days of leavin
on “Should lawyers learn to code? Arguments for and against” ↗…nice to work with, javascript is easy to observe in the browser. Both languages are useful and rich. Whatever you choose, find some tutorials online and start. At least for python, I usually recommend "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" or "Learn Python the Hard Way", however, you can find many more. The two other things you will need are a code editor and some understanding of the command line. VS code is a good editor, though notepad++…
on “Ask HN: I want to know how to code. What's the best way for me to start?” ↗For this reason, I often recommend 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python' (https://automatetheboringstuff.com/) to beginners. It hits the basics and then moves pretty quickly to address: OK, what can I actually use this for?
on “Some tiny personal programs I've written” ↗This is wonderful. I've been doing Learn Python the Hard Way and loving it, this is a really cool addition. I recently picked up the book 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python,' and one of the best things about it is the practical applications really help drive understanding - at least for me. At work I write a lot of PowerShell scripts, and I think the reason I took to it…
on “Projects the Hard Way – Coding Projects for Early Coders” ↗Exactly. There is really profound computer illiteracy in this country (the US), and this kind of mundane, practical scripting is both the most common sort of programming that people should do, and also the biggest hole in computer education. And yet most people probably think the way to learn programming is to take a course on iOS app design rather than batch file rename or how to automate the bor
on “Code that everyone should know how to write” ↗