Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming

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

Created by: Al Sweigart
Software developer, tech book author

What Will I 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.

Target audience

• 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.