A few weeks ago I finished reading “Automate the boring stuff with Python” from Al Sweigart, In this review, I’ll try to make a good review of the book and talk about the main chapters.
It’s a book recommended for novices, for me, it’s a good book for beginners, but for people who already know how to program in other dynamic and interpreted programming language, I think is not necessary to read this book, go ahead and read something more advanced.
TL;DR: If you know how to program in another interpreted programming language like Ruby, go ahead and read something more advanced, if you are a beginner, start with this book, it’s a very good book to start coding.
If you want to know more about this book, you can check here: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
Print / Publisher
The book publisher is the famous no starch press, that have a lot of famous books like:
And much more, I think every experienced programmer knows nostarch very well because they have a lot of famous and good books, if you are a beginner, you can trust them.
I didn’t have the physical edition of this book, I’ve read the digital edition on my Kindle Paperwhite, read technical books on digital readers is always it’s always a fear because some books don’t look good at the small screens, especially the code snippets, but this was not the problem of this book, I think large publishers like nostarch or O’Reilly you’ll never going to have this problem.
The physical edition I think should be excellent too, because I have other books from nostarch and no one disappointed me.
Content
The book is divided into two parts, the first one talks about all the basic things of any programming language like variables, loops, ifs/else and etc. This part is good to understand the basic of python. This part covers all between variables and manipulates text.
The second part and the most interesting show you how to automate boring stuff with python in a simple way, at this part you develop a lot of applications, for example reading Excel documents. This part has eleven chapters, talking about a lot of things, this is the best part of my opinion, the author shows you how to do a lot of cool things like web scraping 🙂
Final Conclusions
The most interesting is the second part when you create a lot of applications to automate the boring stuff, but the first part is good to understand and knows the python basic. One thing that I loved in this book is the fact that it has a lot of exercises (with answers) to you train what you learned in the chapter, if you do all the exercises your read will be funnier and you’ll learn much more.
The only bad thing on this book is that this is a simple book for people that already know how to program, but this is not a problem because the book doesn’t say that is something advanced, but even for who already knows how to program, the second part with practical projects can be very good.
Final thoughts
This is my first book review and I’ll try to get better on the next review posts, I’ll try to review every technical book that I read.
If you want to know more about this book, you can check here: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/
If you have any question that I can help you, please ask! Send an email (otaviopvaladares@gmail.com), pm me on my Twitter or comment on this post!
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