Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming

Name: Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming
Rating: 4.7 (101729 reviews)

A practical programming course for office workers, academics, and administrators who want to improve their productivity.

(101,729 ratings)

1,048,029 students

Created by Al Sweigart

Last updated 4/2021

English

English, Arabic [Auto],

What you'll learn

Automate tasks on their computer by writing simple Python programs.
Write programs that can do text pattern recognition with "regular expressions".
Programmatically generate and update Excel spreadsheets.
Parse PDFs and Word documents.
Crawl web sites and pull information from online sources.
Write programs that send out email notifications.
Use Python's debugging tools to quickly figure out bugs in your code.
Programmatically control the mouse and keyboard to click and type for you.

Requirements

No programming experience is required.
Downloading and installing Python is covered at the start of the course.
Basic computer skills: surfing websites, running programs, saving and opening documents, etc.

Description

If you're an office worker, student, administrator, or just want to become more productive with your computer, programming will allow you write code that can automate tedious tasks. This course follows the popular (and free!) book, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python was written for people who want to get up to speed writing small programs that do practical tasks as soon as possible. You don't need to know sorting algorithms or object-oriented programming, so this course skips all the computer science and concentrates on writing code that gets stuff done.

This course is for complete beginners and covers the popular Python programming language. You'll learn basic concepts as well as:

Web scraping
Parsing PDFs and Excel spreadsheets
Automating the keyboard and mouse
Sending emails and texts
And several other practical topics

By the end of this course, you'll be able to write code that not only dramatically increases your productivity, but also be able to list this fun and creative skill on your resume.

Who this course is for:

Office workers, students, small/home business workers, and administrators would want to improve their productivity.
Aspiring software engineers who want to add skills to their programming toolbelt.
Computer users who have heard the "learn to code" message, but want practical reasons to learn programming.
Experienced Python software engineers can skip the first half of the course, but may find the later parts that cover various third-party modules helpful.
While this course doesn't cover specific devops tools, this course would be useful for QA, devops, and admins who want to learn scripting in Python.

Featured review

Anthony N.

22 courses

2 reviews

3 years ago

Amazed by Al's knowledge + teaching abilities. Exceeded all my expectations! Especially enjoyed the GUI automation. Actually wish I would have found this course while I was still working in tech years ago...could have written myself scripts and saved our Engineering team (and myself) lots of time. Over the past two weeks have written scripts that save time at work and even a couple for the wife (who now thinks I'm brilliant) so that's pretty great.

Al Sweigart

Software developer, tech book author

4.7 Instructor Rating
106,328 Reviews
1,093,411 Students
2 Courses

Al Sweigart is a software developer and author. He has written eight programming books, spoken at Python conferences, and has taught both kids and adults how to program. Python is his favorite programming language, and he is the developer of several open source modules for it. He is driven to make programming knowledge available to all, and his books freely available under a Creative Commons license.