Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

The author does a great job of presenting the python language in an easy to read and approchable manner. I am really enjoying this book and have learned a lot. Before starting this book I knew nearly nothing about python and programming, but this book has helped to supplement my knowledge.

I have six books from this company now, three on Linux and three on Python. All are excellent additions to any library. The material they present continues to be easy to understand with every new book I buy from them. Coding is NOT easy, there's a lot of stuff to learn and tons that you've got to commit to memory. These books make the process enjoyable, and they use practical examples that make it a lot easier to understand things like the flow of logic within statements.Allow me to give a little context: I started with computers in the 80's when I was a kid. BASIC was all I had access to, fun, but not a great start. My first PC came along and I learned DOS, despite the mostly crappy documentation. Linux came along at the end of the 90's and, while it was a great OS back then, documentation held it back on the desktop. Best I could do was get it to boot, so Windows was the only choice for a couple decades.Flash forward to the present, and I've ditched Windows completely, picked up a couple books (I don't yet own a book on Linux NOT published by No Starch) and I do better now with Linux than I ever did with Windows. Linux documentation quality is also light-years beyond what it was in the 90's, too. I spent a month on Mint and went straight to Arch. Things have changed THAT much.

This is great. I don't know if it would be great for an absolute beginner. I took a Coursera course on Python called Python For Everybody. That was a fantastic beginner course for total newbies. This was my follow-up. This covers a lot of ground and I was totally impressed and found it very fun and educational. I like the combination of practice projects during the chapter, followed by questions to answer at the end of each chapter and some more projects at the end of the chapter. Totally lays a great foundation for each topic. I think some of the Python packages are out of date though or there are some code errors. I had to find workarounds on Stack Overflow. Overall, I loved this book!!!

While this is indeed a great book to get started with python projects I won’t say it’s a great book for total beginners.The author often uses coding concepts at the beginning of the book that are not explained until a later chapter leaving some beginners feeling overwhelmed with his programming methods.I am not a beginner though so understanding the basics was easy for me. The projects are really good for beginners too. Though I would recommend starting with Python Crash Course 2nd edition which goes through the fundamentals in greater detail and is more organized in its teaching approach (it also comes with projects at the end of the fundamental chapters).Overall good book just wished it was better organized for the “beginner”

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is an easy-to-read and quick-to-apply Python book with many practical program examples. Thanks, Al!I didn't do any programming other than simple automation shell scripts after graduation. This summer, I wanted to help my interns build a new MVP (minimum viable product). I was keen to develop some automation tools to help my customers control their cameras. I am glad that I took action to learn and code in Python!I was lucky to find "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python"! The book cover is eye-catching. The preface is clear about what readers can achieve from the book. The code examples and quizzes are very useful and practical, such as how to find information using Regular Expressions, send text messages with Twilio, and draw text on images. I applied them to build my first Python-based MVP!Programming is a creative activity. I am happy to create Python tools to help me automate boring and very boring tasks! I want to go further! I continue my Python journey with "Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python"!

Received fast. Great book.

I am working through this book and haven't finished it yet. I am a long term programmer having programmed for pay in Fortran for multiple jobs. I have been programming for over 30 years and learning an object oriented language requires a shift in perspective. So, I need little in algorithm development but details on the language features is important and capabilities to do the things that were simple in other languages is important to know how to do it in Python. This book is very complementary to the book Think Python, IMHO.I am working in Data Science and Machine Learning in particular and found that my ability to program in Python was lacking. So far this book has done a very good job familiarizing me with how to do certain critical things in Python. For Data Science having a section on web site data scraping is very important. I could just look how to do this. Also the data structures are much richer and varied. In Fortran you created any complexity in data structure yourself. I highly recommend this book for both new programmers and advanced programmers who need or want to learn Python.