Automate the Boring Stuff

Practical Programming for Total Beginners

These are my notes from working through the book Automate the boring Stuff by Al Sweigart and published in 2015.

Synopsis taken from the book.

Everyone should learn to code, but not everyone needs to become a software engineer or computer scientist. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is written for office workers, students, administrators, and anyone who uses a computer to learn how to code small, practical programs to automate tasks on their computer.

• Have a folder with thousands of files that need to be renamed?
• Need to look through thousands of rows in an Excel spreadsheet looking for ones to update?
• Have to pull text off of several web pages?
• Want to copy the data from hundreds of PDFs?
• Have any tedious computer task that you wish you had an intern for?

Normally this would involve hours of mindless clicking and typing. But programming your computer to do it will save you time and effort.