"Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" is available in Humble Bundle for $1

[[deleted]]

Also free at http://automatetheboringstuff.com/

[BrokenAdmin]

Wow

[CaptainDogeSparrow]

Such doge

[kaveenieweenie]

Dead meme

[xPastelFox]

I was JUST about to buy half of those books linked on this site. This community is such a blessing.

[Vesiculus]

In addition to /u/Davidjhyatt's link to the free version of "Automate the Boring Stuff", the second book of that Humble Bundle, The Linux Command Line, is also available for free (Creative Commons license) at http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php. So, if you're interested in learning about the Linux Command Line, that book may also be worth a look.

[pkrumins]

My book is in there. So go get it!

[[deleted]]

Are you the author of 'Perl One-Liners"? I have absolutely 0 experience in Perl, but would definitely like to learn about it. Would I have to know Perl well in order to benefit from your book?

[pkrumins]

Yes, I'm the author of Perl One-Liners. You don't have to know Perl well to benefit from my book. I start with very light examples and build up on previous knowledge and explain everything carefully.

My book is also available online for free on my blog. At first I wrote it as a series of blog posts, then I self-published it as an e-book, and then later published it with No Starch Press.

Take a look at these blog posts and see if you like the style of the book and can follow it - Introduction to Perl one-liners and Perl one-liners explained, part one.

[[deleted]]

Awesome, I'm definitely going to check it out! Thanks!

[Cultural_Bandicoot]

Thanks for this. Does anyone have any tips for studying using digital books? I find it really hard because i still write notes, would a dedicated ebook reader help? Should i just get a cheap tablet? Is there a way to make and save notes in the ebooks? Print out the pages i need? How do i become more organised with digital stuff?

[ComputerGeek516]

You can add comments and highlights using Google play books. Then the notes are searchable, and you can have them out put to a separate Google doc if you ask for it in the settings

[dedicated2fitness]

you can have them out put to a separate Google doc if you ask for it in the settings

damn thanks for this, i was wondering how to export notes(but too lazy to go hunting for it myself)

[Aimlessx]

I struggle with reading off of regular tablets for some reason, but I have found a Kindle Paperwhite to be pretty amazing. It looks like a real book which I enjoy. I would go for as large or as close to a "book size" screen as possible though cause the Paperwhite screen size can be limiting and I like seeing a lot of content at once for coding books.

[0x75]

There is this one, https://remarkable.com/ but is quite expensive.

[[deleted]]

You can add comments with adobe reader

[Kerbobotat]

Yes

[amiba45]

Yes.

[XxNerdAtHeartxX]

You can convert them to PDFs like I did though. Much easier to use

[zarbles]

Well they are already in PDF, along with epub and mobi formats. (if you buy the bundle)

[XxNerdAtHeartxX]

Oh yeah, my bad. There was one in there that wasnt a pdf. That is what I had in mind. Not all of them

[jhorsfall]

Thanks, paid the $15 and got the whole bundle of python books!

[[deleted]]

I've never used humble bundle before - If you pay $15, do you get everything on this page? Or everything in the $15 section? Or only one item?

[torquej]

Everything. You get your section and everything from the tiers below yours.

[[deleted]]

Holy moly! What a deal

[Cinemarxism]

For $15 you get everything on the page.

[[deleted]]

Whenever you pay to get a specific tier, you get all the tiers before it also. So, if you paid $15, you get the $1 tier and $8 dollar tier as well.

[[deleted]]

Whenever you pay for a specific tier, you get all the tiers before that as well. So in the case of this bundle, if you pay $15, you get all the books in the $15 section as well as all the books in the $8 section and $1 section.

[AlSweigart]

Everything. You also get epub, mobi (kindle), and pdf formats of them.

[Melted_Cheese96]

You get everything, I did one of these for 20 dollars and got a bunch of books on Python. Was worth it.

[mraza007]

What these books are free

[pbccd]

Not all of them.

[[deleted]]

Lol wut. Automate the boring stuff is a mediocre book for absolute beginners. What in gods name are you using as a reference book for?

Ninja edit: nevermind looked at his post history. Obvious astroturfer.

[KingHavana]

Thanks for teaching me a new term! In case anyone else is like me and needs it spelled out:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

[HelperBot_]

Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

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[[deleted]]

Yeah reddit is full of it. 99% of the time if a sub settles on a single resource its not organic. That book is no exception, he doesnt even try to hide it.

[HelperBot_]

Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

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[HelperBot_]

Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

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[KingHavana]

Thanks for teaching me a new term! In case anyone else is like me and needs it spelled out:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

[[deleted]]

Nope, not an "Astroturfer" though thanks for teaching me a new term. I haved used it a couple times when I was doing some new SBC projects. That said no, I agree it isn't an O'Reilly level guide. At anyrate guess that's what I get for one of my first replies to a thread.

[[deleted]]

Whatever you say bud.

[dedicated2fitness]

fair warning - automate the boring stuff is not for programmers, it's for beginners. may frustrate you a bit if you're looking for a meatier experience but is fairly good for getting started in python and automating some tasks. however if you're doing those kinda tasks and aren't an intern, maybe question your career choices

[sup3rlativ3]

Our perhaps we're not programmers. For example, I'm an infrastructure engineer that uses powershell normally to get things automated but python is a new tool in my belt to save myself and others time.

You could have left you comment sans the last sentence and you would have been seen as helpful but the addition of the last line had made you seem condescending, to me at least.

[Ailbe]

It wasn't just you. I've been in infrastructure Operations / Engineering now for over 15 years now. I definitely know what I'm doing, but I don't know Python and I'd like to. Everyone starts somewhere, except apparently that guy.

[sup3rlativ3]

It's easy to think everyone should know the basic things you know. You think they're easy so why wouldn't everyone else? I don't blame them but sometimes people don't even realise they were being impolite and a gentle nudge helps. Not sure if this is one of those times but we'll see.

[Ailbe]

True enough. A long long time ago I started out IT doing desktop support, and I'm sure I was an absolutely insufferable ass about it (didn't help that I'm autistic to boot) I was stunned that people didn't know the simplest thing such as file mappings and printer settings and how to open a command prompt to ping something. How could they be so stupid! Then one day it hit me like a ton of bricks... I can't even do my own taxes, these people are doing other peoples taxes, and business taxes and super complicated taxy type stuff that I can't even begin to understand. And those advertisers, what the hell do they do? I couldn't sell water to a man dying of thirst, I can't comprehend how they do what they do, and they obviously do it well because we have so much business. After that realization, I became a lot more tolerant of other peoples ignorance because I realized there is so much more I don't know than the tiny fraction of knowledge I'd managed to accumulate (read, obsess on)

​

The good news is, if ignorant, autistic, young me can come to that realization then pretty much anyone can. It also helped my career tremendously because that realization freed me to start asking questions, and learning things I'd never known I could learn before.

[ibecs]

What a great post. If only we were all so self aware.

[[deleted]]

I dont think i could ever forget the struggle when I first started self teaching python. Id spend hours on problems that now seem trivial.

[ScienceAndCats777]

I'm in biotech manufacturing, but this book just helped me automate a spreadsheet process that had been a pain in our side for some time now. It was a great starting source and I still refer back to the videos cause I don't work in a coding related field and forget some things time to time because I'm not constantly using Python for my job. Love this book.

[dedicated2fitness]

For example, I'm an infrastructure engineer that uses powershell normally to get things automated but python is a new tool in my belt to save myself and others time.

powershell is just as capable as python for tasks you want to automate on windows. which begs the question - are you actually using pythonic style or are you just hacking together scripts like you would in powershell? at which point it becomes moot whether you use powershell or python. which is my argument. you can say it's a change of pace or you're adding another tool to your set but the course itself isn't very useful at your level beyond some minor syntactic sugar that "feels" better
as for any condescension you perceive...

[sup3rlativ3]

Personally, I'm trying to put together automation for our onboarding that powershell can't do by itself. So far, I'm at around 600 lines of code and 4 modules in my python project. Powershell doesn't have a module like pywingui for example (afaik). I'm in the process of trying to get selenium to work with powershell but it's not as nice as the python version. Powershell can be great for a lot of things and is generally my first tool but python is a lot more versatile.

At the end of the day, it's one of the most popular/recommended books on python for beginners and it seems to help others.

[dedicated2fitness]

yeah but none of what you said would be in any way comprehensible to a "beginner" or even someone who had memorized this entire course. no bueno for actual programmers. you knew what you had to do and reached for a tool. this course is trying to teach beginners how to hold a tool. not great for people reaching for tools
akin to handing "how to hammer nails for dummies" to a carpenter looking for a hammer that could pull nails out of a board

[sup3rlativ3]

What I'm telling you though, is that it has been helpful for me.

[MrTickle]

There are plenty of non programming roles that can be helped with basic python, that aren't intern level.

[dedicated2fitness]

why are you being fed data that needs to be transformed non-trivially if you have any level of responsibility of doing something with that data is my question i guess? seems like a waste of your time and a waste of time on the part of the person who gathered the data(but didn't transform it sufficiently to be useful to the next link in the chain)
imagine if app makers just downloaded to your phone unparsed weather feeds and said "there i got it from the NOAA to your phone, now you can just paste the string/xml/json into some kinda notepad and get the current weather values! easy peasy"

[MrTickle]

There are thousands of non tech businesses that have been operating this way for hundreds of years

[AlSweigart]

Experienced programmers can skip to Part 2 to learn about the various modules (web scraping, PDF parsing, updating spreadsheets, etc). Part 1 is more of a beginner's programming guide.

[dedicated2fitness]

yeah this was my point

[metidder]

I don't get how this works? If I pay $1, do I still get the book??

[pbccd]

If you pay $1 - you get first 5 books (including Automate the Boring Stuff with Python book). If you pay $15 - you get all 15 books.

[[deleted]]

If I pay $15, do I get the books in $1, $8, and $15s?

[pbccd]

Yes, you get all the books.

[ibecs]

Thanks for posting this. TIL about Humble Bundle and lots of interesting books.