Sweigart - Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

Al Sweigart is a software developer and tech book author living in San Francisco. Python is his favorite programming language, and he is the developer of several open source modules for it. His other books are freely available under a Creative Commons license on his website http://www.inventwithpython.com/ . His cat weighs 14 pounds.

Ari Lacenski is a developer of Android applications and Python software. She lives in San Francisco, where she writes about Android programming at http://gradlewhy.ghost.io/ and mentors with Women Who Code. Shes also a folk guitarist.

I couldnt have written a book like this without the help of a lot of people. Id like to thank Bill Pollock; my editors, Laurel Chun, Leslie Shen, Greg Poulos, and Jennifer Griffith-Delgado; and the rest of the staff at No Starch Press for their invaluable help. Thanks to my tech reviewer, Ari Lacenski, for great suggestions, edits, and support.

Many thanks to our Benevolent Dictator For Life, Guido van Rossum, and everyone at the Python Software Foundation for their great work. The Python community is the best one Ive found in the tech industry.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, friends, and the gang at Shotwells for not minding the busy life Ive had while writing this book. Cheers!

Youve just done in two hours what it takes the three of us two days to do. My college roommate was working at a retail electronics store in the early 2000s. Occasionally, the store would receive a spreadsheet of thousands of product prices from its competitor. A team of three employees would print the spreadsheet onto a thick stack of paper and split it among themselves. For each product price, they would look up their stores price and note all the products that their competitors sold for less. It usually took a couple of days.

You know, I could write a program to do that if you have the original file for the printouts, my roommate told them, when he saw them sitting on the floor with papers scattered and stacked around them.

After a couple of hours, he had a short program that read a competitors price from a file, found the product in the stores database, and noted whether the competitor was cheaper. He was still new to programming, and he spent most of his time looking up documentation in a programming book. The actual program took only a few seconds to run. My roommate and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day.

This is the power of computer programming. A computer is like a Swiss Army knife that you can configure for countless tasks. Many people spend hours clicking and typing to perform repetitive tasks, unaware that the machine theyre using could do their job in seconds if they gave it the right instructions.