Chapter 1, Working with the Web, talks about the interesting world of the World Wide Web and covers the numerous ways in which one can interact with the Web using Python modules.

It starts by covering the basics of HTTP Web requests and slowly takes the readers to more advanced topics such as web scraping and downloading content from the Web. The chapter also equips you with writing your own asynchronous web servers and helps you understand and build web automation.

In the last section, the chapter helps you automate lead generation--a classical situation that marketers face on a regular basis--using Python recipes.

Chapter 2, Working with CSV and Excel Worksheets, takes you through Python recipes that will help you simplify and automate redundant tasks with CSV and Excel sheets. Until computers became a daily part of our lives, office records were stored in files and managed on office desks. Thanks to the world of Excel sheets we can manage our data in a much better way.

The first part of this chapter helps you perform read/write operations on CSV files. It also helps you write your own CSV dialects. Don’t know what we mean by dialects? Well, find it out in this chapter! You will also learn how to automate the management of employee information, an integral part of HR processes, with CSV files and Python code.

The second part of the chapter equips you with the knowledge of performing operations such as retrieving and inserting data in Excel worksheets. It also covers some advanced operations, such as formatting cells, performing mathematical tasks with formulas, and inserting charts. Lastly, with a nice example, it explains how you could automate the income statement analysis across different years for a finance team.

Chapter 3, Getting Creative with PDF Files and Documents, talks about how Word documents and PDF files have become some of the most commonly used file formats by business professionals and how you can automate mundane tasks in PDFs and Word documents using Python. Want to send an invoice to your customer or send a set of requirements to your vendor? Businesses often end up using PDF files and Word documents for such needs.

This chapter starts by covering operations that you can perform with PDF files using Python recipes. You will gain knowledge on generating and reading PDF files, copying them, and even manipulating them to build your own header and footer formats. Do you know you can merge many PDF files with a simple Python recipe? Would you like to automate the process of generating pay slips for your organization? Sounds interesting? Then this chapter is definitely for you!

This chapter also takes you on a journey of working with Word documents. It helps you build knowledge on reading and writing data into Word files. Adding tables, images, charts; you name it, and this chapter covers it. If that’s not enough, this chapter also takes an example from HR processes and helps you build a customized new-hire orientation program schedule for new employees based on their Business Unit.

Chapter 4, Playing with SMS and Voice Notifications, opens up a whole new world of automation with SMS and voice notifications. It starts with a nice introduction to cloud telephony and covers its practical use cases.

In the initial section of this chapter, we discuss how SMS text messages are useful in certain situations. You will learn how to send SMS messages and receive incoming texts with Python recipes. The section on SMS notifications ends by showing how one could automate a customer service process for a Domino’s Pizza store.

The chapter also covers voice notifications in detail; you will be familiarized with voice workflows, such as sending voice messages and receiving incoming voice calls with Python code snippets. And did you know you could automate customer support by building our own contact center? Interested? You've got to take a look at this chapter.

Chapter 5, Fun with E-mails, covers interesting Python recipes, such as sending e-mail messages, beautifying e-mail content with MIME, and even working with attachments. E-mails have been ubiquitous for the last 2-3 decades; you see them everywhere! You are so used to working with them and for so many reasons. But did you ever realize you could manipulate your inbox with Python snippets?

This chapter will also help you fetch and read e-mail conversations and clear up your inbox by deleting messages. Interested in adding labels to select messages, or would you like to understand more about e-mail encryption? Well, this chapter covers it for you. And, of course, the chapter ends with an example of automating customer support flows with a Python recipe.

Chapter 6, Presentations and More, explores the various ways in which you can generate presentations of your own in an automated way using Python. This chapter shows how you can create a new presentation and add content or slides to it. It also shows you ways of reading or updating existing presentations and inserting charts, tables, and pictures—basically, all the operations you need. And, of course, we automate a weekly sales report for a sales manager using Python recipes. This one’s dedicated to all the sales managers out there.

Chapter 7, Power of APIs, takes you on a journey to the interesting world of APIs. APIs are a critical part of the World Wide Web today. Talking across services, sharing information, and many other operations rely on APIs and Webhooks.

The chapter starts with an introduction to REST APIs, covers the fundamentals of the REST philosophy, and provides you with the knowledge required to develope your own APIs. It also shows how you could automate the scheduling of product updates on social media--an essential use case for marketing teams--with Python recipes and Twitter REST APIs.

In the next section, the chapter covers Webhooks, a critical aspect of the Web today. It helps you implement Webhooks and manifests how a business professional can leverage Web hooks to automate lead management using Python recipes.

Chapter 8, Talking to Bots, takes you to the brand new world of bots. It starts by classifying bots based on their capabilities and shows how you could build and use bots on apps such as Telegram.

The chapter also gives you a brief introduction to the concepts of stateless and stateful, and it gives you the taste of integrating artificial intelligence algorithms in bots. In the end, the chapter takes an example of a book publishing website and shows how bots can be used to achieve relevant interactions with customers--a problem that the customer success teams deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Chapter 9, Imagining Images, provides you a jumpstart for working with images. It shows you how to convert your images to different formats (considering compression), resize and crop images, and also how to generate thumbnails with Python. I think you’re already thinking of some use cases.

Not just that, it also you provides you with a foundation of finding the difference between images and comparing them, which can be very useful for you to build an image-based search algorithm. Lastly, the chapter motivates you to move your company to a paperless mode by automating the process of scanning documents and indexing them using Python.

Chapter 10, Data Analysis and Visualizations, begins with an introduction to the data analysis process and covers essential aspects in a simplistic way. It shows how you could read and select relevant data with techniques such as filtering and data aggregation.

It also helps you interpret data and generate insights with visualizations using Python recipes. Lastly, the chapter covers a business use case of analyzing social media data and generating insights for a magazine article. Interesting use case, right? You must read the chapter to know more.

Chapter 11, Time in the Zone, covers a nice set of Python recipes to work with date and time objects. It shows you how you could add time or days to your date, compare dates, and represent date and time in multiple formats. It also teaches you how to work with daylight savings and perform time zone calculations with Python.

In the end, the chapter takes an example of automated invoicing and covers issues with time zones to highlight the need for considering time zones while automating business processes.

This books covers Python recipes that aim to help you automate business processes. All you need is a decent computer configuration (1 GB RAM, 10 GB HDD) with Python v2.7.10 installed.

I’m sure you will find at least a couple of use cases that you can automate with the ideas covered in this book. So, keep looking for possibilities of automation in your area of expertise in the office, and surely, the Python recipes in this book will be very helpful.

Automate It! is a book for business professionals and developers. It gives you a great selection of recipes to automate your business processes and development tasks with Python. It provides a platform for you to automate repetitive and time-consuming business tasks and make them efficient.

As the book also targets business professionals from HR, sales, marketing, and customer support backgrounds, technical topics are covered in a detailed way so that they can understand technology and make use of Python recipes to put their life on autopilot.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We got the tree with the help of the fromstring()method that converts the contents of the page (string format) to the HTML format."

A block of code is set as follows:

try:
    r = requests.get("http://www.google.com/")
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print("Error Response:", e.message)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

pip install -U requests

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Now that we have entered Emailand Password, the last thing to do is submit the form and click on the Log Inbutton."

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