Book Review: Automate the Boring Stuff with Python — Al Swegart

Practical Programming for Total Beginners

Quick Summary

Don’t waste your time on redundant tasks such as renaming hundreds of files, sending emails every 15 minutes, or adding a logo to dozens of images… Instead, use Python to automate all this in a few lines of code.

This book will teach you the basics of Python, as well as many practical uses for automation purposes.

The book is available for free here: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

My Thoughts

When you’re learning a new programming language, it can be hard to resist the urge to give up after a couple of pages about theory and syntax. The book teaches you the basics of Python, and switch quickly to practice projects. This is a way that can be quite enjoyable for beginners. It allows you to create small programs quickly, which helps you to stay motivated while learning.

For the people already knowing Python, and just wanting to know how you can automate things using it, this part is useless.

Each automation topic (Excel, images, files, etc…) is accompanied by practical questions. They are useful because they allow you to be sure you’ve understood the topic. The answers can be found at the end of the book, in Appendix C.

Each topic is also accompanied by one practice project totally explained, and other ideas of projects you can do to train.

Overall, the book is really just a collection of knowledge and documentation that can be found with a few clicks on the internet, but when you are a complete beginner, you don’t know what to look for. That’s why this book is mainly aimed at beginners.

To Read or Not to Read?

In short, this book is fun to read if you are a complete beginner, and can help you get started with Python. On the other hand, this is not a “professional” book, meaning that if you want to grasp the subtleties of the syntax and go deeper into your Python learning, you will have to go to another book.

If you already have some experience with Python, you can give a try to this book, and read it very quickly. Perhaps there are things you didn’t know exist in this language, and you can discover them through this book.

In short, this book is fun to read if you are a complete beginner, and can help you get started with Python. On the other hand, this is not a “professional” book, meaning that if you want to grasp the subtleties of the syntax and go deeper into your Python learning, you will have to go to another book.