Python Automation Made Easy!

This video provides an overview of the entire course.

Determine the power of programming tools and benefit from them in terms of code quality and productivity.

   •  Acknowledge human shortcomings at coding

   •  Explain how IDEs, and VCSs can help you code efficiently

   •  Enjoy the benefits of using proper programming tools

Discover PyCharm, a powerful and easy-to-use IDE which provides smart Python coding support and seamless integration with Git.

   •  Learn what PyCharm is; and why you should use it

   •  Install PyCharm on your platform

   •  Take a tour of major PyCharm features

Learn about Version Control Systems which special focus on Git, a modern distributed VCS.

   •  Learn what VCSs are and how they work

   •  Meet Git and learn to work with it

   •  Create a sample Git repo

Grasp how to use PyCharm and Git to setup and run a sample Python code project.

   •  Create project and init Git repository

   •  Write, refactor, run and debug code

   •  Commit changes to Git

Avoid losing time on low-level recurrent programming issues; focus on coding to solve high-level value-added tasks.

   •  Explore Libraries and what purpose they solve.

   •  Learn the benefits of using libraries

   •  Take a look at a simple library created in PyCharm

Python standard library offers lots of modules that provide high-level utilities to accomplish common tasks (interacting with operating systems, handling dates and time, logging and so on).

   •  Learn the Python standard library.

   •  Meet the Python standard library modules

   •  Use the math module in your application

Determine the rationales that should guide the search for the best libraries solving a specific task.

   •  Define a scope for your problem

   •  Learn where to search for libraries

   •  Assess and compare libraries

Learn how to use the pip utility to install new Python packages alongside the local standard library.

   •  Learn what pip is.

   •  Install pip on your platform

   •  Use pip to install the tqdm library

Master how to use virtualenv to isolate the libraries that your code depends on, shielding it from unintentional system-wide library upgrades.

   •  Understand the risks involved in system-wide library upgrade

   •  Learn virtualenv as a solution for the problem

   •  Create a virtualenv from PyCharm

Discover Logging, which is a way to record application events that helps you with problem determination.

   •  Learn the Python loggers, handlers and log levels

   •  List of logging handler types

   •  Implement using code

What are regular expressions, which are a very powerful way to search for specific patterns in a string?

   •  Define regular expressions

   •  The re Python module

   •  Implement python code

Determine how Decorators allow dynamic extension of functions behavior. Context Managers are a way to easily allocate/release transactional resources in a managed fashion.

   •  What are decorators

   •  What are context managers

   •  Implementation using code

In this video, we are going to learn about Generators and how they behave like iterators and help to lazily evaluate logic for producing a set of values that you can iterate on. Generator expressions are a short syntax to create generators on the fly.

   •  Define generators

   •  Define generator expressions

   •  Implement them using code

Discover how Magic methods are a way to enrich your classes with the capability to emulate built-in Python types and structures, resulting in more Pythonic code.

   •  Define magic methods

   •  Showcase of magic methods

   •  Implement them using Pythonic code

Determine how Metaprogramming allows manipulation of code. We will focus on manipulating class instantiation via metaclasses usage.

   •  Introduce classes as manipulableobjects

   •  Define metaclasss

   •  Implement using code

Understand how Functional programming allows you to write code as stateless evaluations of functions upon data, with the benefits of avoiding size effects and leaving input data immutable.

   •  Define functional programming

   •  Map, filter and reduce

   •  Implement using code

Study how Python native idioms helps you to write less code that runs faster and is more secure

   •  Define Pythonic idioms are

   •  Explore a few Pythonic code idioms

   •  Demonstrate code implementation

Determine how Python scripting is very efficient when it comes to walk folders and manipulate their contents.

   •  Walk folders with pathlib

   •  Delete files and folders with pathlib and shutil

   •  Walk, filter and clean a messy folder using python.

Discover how regular expression helps you to organize files and folders on your computer so that they obey a naming pattern.

   •  Learn to organize lots of files based on their names.

   •  Copy and move files with shutil.

   •  Organize photos of vacation using code

Learn how hashes are a good solution to quickly understand if modifications have been made to a file set. If you need to drill down to what changes have been made, diffs are the way to go.

   •  What is a hash?

   •  What are diffs?

   •  Compare a set of text files using python code

Study how File compression can be helpful, especially when you need to send big amounts of data through the wire.

   •  Why is data compression useful?

   •  The zipfile and zlib modules

   •  Code implementation of Compressing a directory tree into a zipped archive

Learn how to encrypt data in your applications since almost all modern network applications rely on strong cryptographic algorithms in order to protect data exchanged among parties.

   •  Introduction to public-key cryptography

   •  Install PyCrpytodome

   •  Encrypting a file using python code

In this video, you will learn how to read and write files using python.

   •  Compare and contrast text and binary files

   •  Explore context managers as file gatekeepers

   •  Code: read and write a binary file

Explore CSV file format and libraries. Also, learn how to read and write CSV file.

   •  Introduce the CSV format

   •  Explore libraries to work with CSV

   •  Code: read and write a CSV file

Take a look at CSV file format and libraries. Also, learn how to read and write CSV file.

   •  Introduce the XML format

   •  Explore libraries to work with XML

   •  Code: Read and write an XML file

Explore JSON and YAML file format and libraries. After that, learn how to read and write JSON and YAML files.

   •  Introduce the JSON and YAML formats

   •  Explore libraries to work with JSON and YML

   •  Code: Read and write JSON and YAML files

Learn about Word file format and libraries. Also, learn how to read and write them.

   •  Introduce the Word DOCX format

   •  Explore libraries to work with Word DOCX

   •  Code: Read and write a Word DOCX file

Study about Excel XLS which is the binary file format used by the Microsoft Excel application to store data.

   •  Introduce the Excel XLSX format

   •  Explore libraries to work with Excel XLSX

   •  Code: Read and write an Excel XLSX file

Learn how to read and write PDF file in python.

   •  Introduce the PDF format

   •  Explore libraries to work with PDF

   •  Code: Read, rotate, and merge two PDF files

Images are worth a thousand words; therefore we use them a lot in our everyday life. Being able to read images from Python code opens up a whole new world of possibilities to manipulate them.

   •  What images really are

   •  Meet and install Pillow

   •  Code: Read and display an image

Sometimes the dimensions of images are not okay for printing it, or you might just want to remove some unwelcomed features in a photo.

   •  Introduce image cropping

   •  Introduce image resizing

   •  Code: Crop and resize an image

Pillow allows you to apply algorithmic filters to images, which helps identify, and exalt features; to either change image colors or apply special effects. Imagination is the limit!

   •  Introduce edges extraction

   •  Introduce image recoloring

   •  Code: Extract image edges and recolor it

When you publish an image anywhere on the Internet you might want to add it a proof of ownership so to avoid potential intellectual property theft.

   •  Introduce the importance of watermarking.

   •  Explore watermark techniques

   •  Code: Watermark an image

Sometimes you need to save the whole contents of your computer screen to an image, so that you can share that with others or preserve it for later usage.

   •  Define screenshots

   •  Explore the pyscreenshot library

   •  Code: Take a screenshot

QR codes are an easy way to embed information into an image that can be photographed and then automatically parsed in order to retrieve such information.

   •  Define the QR codes?

   •  Explore the zbarlight library

   •  Code: Read a QR code

Being able to identify human faces in static images or videos can be extremely useful for a variety of purposes.

   •  Introduce Face recognition

   •  Explore the face_recognition library

   •  Code: Identify faces in an image

In order to interact with websites you need an understanding of the protocols and technologies that make up the World Wide Web and proper tooling to leverage its capabilities

   •  Introduce the World Wide Web foundations

   •  Explore the Requests library

   •  Code: Download a file from a website

What if you just need to grab that little piece of information on a specific web page? Web scraping allows you to do that

   •  Explain the anatomy of an HTML page

   •  Explore the Beautifulsoup library

   •  Code: Scrape data from a website

Selenium allows to emulate human interactions with graphical interfaces, including web browsers: you can use them to automatically interact with websites.

   •  Define a web browser?

   •  Setup Selenium

   •  Code: Emulate human interaction with a website

APIs provide programmatic access to datasets and operations from an online service provider. They are based on the HTTP protocol and allow any HTTP-compliant device to interact with them.

   •  Define an API?

   •  Go through scenarios enabled by APIs usage

   •  Showcase famous APIs

Requests can be used to interact with APIs, but you need to know how HTTP works in order to do that.

   •  Explore a primer on HTTP

   •  Learn about the httpbin test service

   •  Code: Interact with httpbin using Requests

In order to use an API you need to understand how it works by reading its documentation and usage examples, and usually you need to ask for an authentication token.

   •  Learn the prerequisites to use an API

   •  Learn about the Coinmarketcap API

   •  Code: Retrieving current Litecoin price from the Coinmarketcap API

OpenWeatherMap is a weather observation and forecast service that provides a free-tiered web API. We will learn how easy it is to retrieve weather data from it using the PyOWM library.

   •  Define an API client SDK?

   •  Explore PyOWM: a client SKD for the OpenWeatherMap API

   •  Code: Retrieving current weather in Tokyo using PyOWM

Problem: Programmatically read your Gmail inbox and send an email to somebody.

   •  Setup your Gmail account

   •  Setup Gmail Sender

   •  Code sample

Problem: Programmatically publish a tweet on Twitter.

   •  Setup your Twitter account

   •  Setup Twithon

   •  Code sample

Problem: Programmatically save some text and a picture to .Evernote then view them on the browser.

   •  Setup your Evernote account

   •  Setup the Evernote Python SDK

   •  Code sample

Problem: programmatically filter Reddit Python RSS feed in order to spot posts containing specific text.

   •  Parse RSS feeds

   •  Setup feedparser

   •  Code sample

Problem: programmatically send a push notification to a mobile app running on your Android smartphone.

   •  Install the mobile app and setup your Firebase account

   •  Setup PyFCM

   •  Code sample

Problem: programmatically send an SMS to a mobile phone number using Twilio.

   •  Setup your Twilio account

   •  Setup Twilio Python Helper Library

   •  Code sample

Problem: save your files on Dropbox, then view them on your browser.

   •  Setup your Dropbox account

   •  Setup the Dropbox Python SDK

   •  Code sample

Web applications are the easiest and most spread way to offer services because they rely on the World Wide Web.

   •  Define a web application?

   •  Understand how distributed systems used to be before web applications

   •  Showcase examples of web applications

Learn how a web app compares to traditional applications and what their typical structure is.

   •  Showcase the features of a typical web application

   •  Understand the request/response flow in web applications

   •  Design of a web application

Web frameworks help you being productive at web development and Model-View-Control favors a clear separation of concerns in your web app.

   •  Define a web framework?

   •  Define the features of web frameworks

   •  Define MVC

Flask and Django are the two prominent web frameworks in the Python ecosystem.

   •  Introduce Flask

   •  Introduce Django

   •  Compare Flask and Django

Install and setup Flask and Bootstrap.

   •  Take up a static website project

   •  Setup Flask and Bootstrap

   •  Lay out the project structure

How to prepare page templates.

   •  Explore Jinja2 page templates

   •  Code sample

Code the request handlers (“controllers”) on the server-side. Think of them as the “C” of “MVC”.

   •  Explore Flask views

   •  Code sample

Implement a user authentication form backed by an authentication mechanism.

   •  Demonstrate user authentication workflow

   •  Code sample

Test both the server-side part and the client-side of the web application.

   •  Explore strategies for testing

   •  Code sample

Learn how relational databases work and why they are useful.

   •  Define a database?

   •  Introduce the Structured Query Language

   •  Explore features of databases

Meet SQLite, a self-contained SQL database engine.

   •  Define SQLite?

   •  Install SQLite

   •  Interact with SQLite from Python

Python offers a nice built-in module to work with SQLite databases.

   •  Introduce SQLite

   •  Code sample

It is more productive to query databases using high-level object-oriented abstractions instead of running direct SQL statements: that’s where ORMs come into play.

   •  Define Object-Relational Mapper?

   •  Explore Django Object-Relational mapper

Django offers an excellent ORM solution allowing to perform queries of arbitrary complexity.

   •  Setup the Django project

   •  Code sample

The first thing that needs to be done when creating a REST API is thinking the resources (data entities) it needs to expose.

   •  Show API we want to create

   •  Define data entities and relationships

Define URLs for the API endpoints and the permission grants on them.

   •  Explore the authentication and authorization model

   •  Define endpoints and methods specification

Generate the Django project structure, write the models and setup the database.

   •  Code sample: Project structure and models

The Django admin is an easy tool to perform data entry for Django web apps.

   •  Define Django admin?

   •  Code sample: Setup Django admin and data entry

Write the Django views and expose them to URL endpoints.

   •  Code sample: views and URL routes

Test your API using the powerful HTTPie HTTP client.

   •  Define HTTPie?

   •  Code sample: Testing

Chatbots are a program that responds to natural language in a way that it’s hard to tell whether they’re programs or humans. Let’s craft one answering questions about crypto prices!

   •  Introduce chatbots

   •  Explore high-level architecture

   •  Define services authentication

We want to design what questions our bot will answer to and what information it will provide back to requesters.

   •  Understand the requirements for bot behavior

   •  Introduce endpoints

   •  Code sample

We will host our chatbot on Heroku, waiting for incoming Facebook message events.

   •  Give an overview of Heroku

   •  Deploy the bot on Heroku

   •  Code sample

A Facebook Page is the graphical messaging interface for users: the page needs to be bound to a Facebook app, which will forward messages to the bot.

   •  Create a Facebook Page

   •  Configure communication with the bot

   •  Code sample

Jupyter is a web tool for fast code prototyping, supporting interactive data science.

   •  Introduce Jupyter

   •  Install Jupyter

   •  Code sample: Managing a notebook

Pandas is a Python library providing high-performance data manipulation and analysis tools. It is extensively used for data cleaning and manipulation.

   •  Define Pandas

   •  Explore Pandas data structures

   •  Code sample: Playing with Pandas data structures

Pandas offer excellent support for loading/dumping data from/to a variety of formats. Data sources can be local or remote.

   •  Read/write datasets with Pandas

   •  Code sample: Importing and exporting datasets

A common example of time-related datasets is financial data.

   •  Explore a financial dataset

   •  Code sample: Data wrangling

The easiest way to make sense out of a dataset is plotting it: visual representations help to easily identify features and patterns in your data.

   •  Learn Data visualization

   •  Explore Matplotlib and Bokeh

   •  Code sample: Visualizing plots

Building a comprehensive dataset is the first step for good data exploration: we will collect data for at least 10 of the major cryptocurrencies.

   •  Explore Data sources for cryptocurrency data

   •  Code: Building the crypto dataset

Moving Averages are indicators that help identifying macro price trends by dropping random price fluctuations over time.

   •  Understand SMAs and EMAs

   •  Code: Calculate SMAs and EMAs for cryptos

Japanese Candlestick plots are compact visualizations of prices over time. MACD is an oscillator that can be used as a trigger for buy and sell signals.

   •  Understand Candlesticks

   •  Explore MACD with Stockstats

   •  Code: Visualize candlesticks and MACD on crypto prices plots

Let us calculate how cryptocurrency close prices correlate over time and test a portfolio composition.

   •  Understand Correlation matrix of crypto close prices

   •  Code: Explore crypto close prices correlation and seasonality