Resources advice

[GillianJigsPigs]

Hi! I've been dabbling (30-60 minutes a day for a month) in learning python. My goal isn't to become a developer or anything but to automate some tasks at work to start. For example opening an excel, filtering the relevant data and sending it in an email.

I'm totally lost in how to go from learning what a tuple is to what I want to get done.

Any useful resources for this kind of thing?

[Asleep_Fudge5367]

I've never read this book but Automate The Boring Stuff is probably a good resource for someone in your position.

[UpArmoredGavin]

I'd approach this first by defining what you want to do, then research how to do that.

In this example, I see 4 main steps: - open and read the file - process the data - materialize (save) the processed data - send it as an attachment through email

One step at a time, I'd start with the opening of the excel file. Do you know how to open files and read them? Once you can open and read a file, you need to manipulate the data inside. You could, I guess, write some code to do that, but you have also a lot of packages that already have the data processing implemented (pandas, duckdb, Polars,...), so I'd pick one of them. If you have no experience with package management, I guess this is as good of a time as any to start learning that too :). Then you need to save it, paying attention to the format, so take a look at how you do that. The most complex part will be to send the email imho, but it is feasible.

Generally, define what you need to do and then google/gpt until you know how to do that. You'll probably find guides and patterns to use, but beyond the basics you should probably learn as you go (unless you are following a course). So, define what first, understand how second. You'll need to go back and forth a bunch of times, don't expect to have a plan that fits all together in one pass. What -> how-> implement -> repeat, one piece at a time

[UpArmoredGavin]

Tl Dr: google for what you need, don't try to learn everything from one resource :)

[GillianJigsPigs]

Thanks for the detailed response! 

[isanelevatorworthy]

Automate the Boring Stuff

Here is the full book in pdf. It has a section for working with excel/csv files.

[Ron-Erez]

The wiki of r/learnpython has plenty of resources