Jaime Buelta - Python Automation Cookbook: Explore the world of automation using Python recipes that will enhance your skills

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First published: September 2018

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Jaime Buelta has been a professional programmer and a full-time Python developer and has been exposed to a lot of different technologies over his career. He has developed software for a variety of fields and industries, including aerospace, networking and communications, industrial SCADA systems, video game online services, and finance services. As part of these companies, he worked closely with various areas, such as marketing, management, sales, and game design, helping the companies achieve to their goals. He is a strong proponent of automating everything and making computers do most of the heavy lifting so users can focus on the important stuff. He is currently living in Dublin, Ireland, and has been a regular speaker at PyCon Ireland.

Mario Corchero is a senior software developer at Bloomberg. He leads the Python infrastructure team in London, enabling the company to work effectively in Python and building company-wide libraries and tools. His professional experience is mainly in C++ and Python, and he has contributed some patches to multiple Python open source projects. He is a PSF fellow, having received the Q3 2018 PSF Community Award, is vice president of Python Espaa (the Python Spain association), and has served as Chair of PyLondinium, PyConES17, and PyCon Charlas at PyCon 2018. Mario is passionate about the Python community, open source, and inner source.

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We are all probably spending time doing small manual tasks that don't add much value. It may be scanning through information sources in search of the small bits of relevant information, working with spreadsheets to generate the same graph over and over, or searching files one by one until find the data we're looking for. Someprobably mostof those tasks are, in fact, automatable. There's an investment upfront, but for the tasks that get repeated over and over, we can use computers to do these kinds of menial tasks and focus our own efforts instead on what humans are good forhigh-level analysis and decision making based on the result. This book will explain how to use the Python language to automatize common business tasks that can be greatly sped up if a computer is doing them.

Given the expressiveness and ease of use of Python, it's surprisingly simple to start making small programs to perform these actions and combine them into more integrated systems. Throughout the book, we will show small, easy-to-follow recipes that can be adapted to your specific needs, and we will combine them to perform more complex actions. We will perform common actions, such as detecting opportunities by scraping the web, analyzing information to generate automatic spreadsheet reports with graphs, communicating with automatically generated emails, getting notifications via text messages, and learning how to run tasks while your mind is focused on other more important stuff.

Though some Python knowledge is required, the book is written with non-programmers in mind, giving clear and instructive recipes that will further the reader's proficiency while being oriented to specific day-to-day goals.