Book Image

Automate it! - Recipes to upskill your business

By : Chetan Giridhar
Book Image

Automate it! - Recipes to upskill your business

By: Chetan Giridhar

Overview of this book

<p>This book gives you a great selection of recipes to automate your business processes with Python, and provides a platform for you to understand how Python is useful to make time consuming and repetitive business tasks more efficient. Python is a mature high level language, has object-oriented programming features, powers various apps, has a huge set of modules, and great community support. Python is extremely easy to use, can help you get complex tasks done efficiently and is an apt choice for our needs.</p> <p>With a classic problem-solution based approach and real-world examples, you will delve into things that automate your business processes. You will begin by learning about the Python modules to work with Web, Worksheets, Presentations and PDFs. You’ll leverage Python recipes to automate processes in HR, Finance and making them efficient and reliable. For instance, company payroll — an integral process in HR will be automated with Python recipes.</p> <p>A few chapters of this book will also help you gain knowledge on working with bots and computer vision. You will learn how to build bots for automating business use cases by integrating artificial intelligence. You’ll also understand how Python is helpful in face detection and building a scanner of your own. You will see how to effectively and easily use Python code to manage SMS and voice notifications, opening a world of possibilities using cloud telephony to solve your business needs. Moving forward, you will learn to work with APIs, Webhooks and Emails to automate Marketing and Customer Support processes. Finally, using the various Python libraries, this book will arm you with knowledge to customize data solutions and generate reports to meet your business needs.</p> <p>This book will help you up-skill and make your business processes efficient with the various Python recipes covered in this book.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Automate it!
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

An introduction to Webhooks


In the last section, we understood how to design and develop REST APIs and how to leverage REST APIs to our benefit by taking an example of Twitter/Facebook automation. Let's look at another amazing piece: Webhooks. A Webhook is an HTTP callback--an HTTP POST request to a user-defined URL (implemented as an HTTP API) when a favorable event occurs. Webhooks are often referred to as reverse APIs and are used for real-time communication or integration across services. But before we go deeper, let's understand a bit about polling.

You might have seen applications polling for long hours to check whether an event has occurred so that they can perform some follow-up action for the event. Take a real-world example. You go to a self-service restaurant and order your favorite pizza for lunch. The guy at the counter gives you an order number and tells you to watch the token machine for your order number so that you can collect your pizza. While everybody around is busy eating...