Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Book Image

Building Slack Bots

Overview of this book

Slack promises that its users will "be less busy." Slack bots interact with users in Slack chatrooms, providing useful immediate information, and automating work. This book gives you everything you need to build powerful and useful Slack bots. You’ll see how to hook into the Slack API to create software that can read and post to chatrooms, respond to commands and hints given in natural conversational language, and build fun and useful bots for your own place of work, both as a front end to your own service and to distribute and share as apps. You can even sell your bots and build a business as a Slack bot developer. Throughout the book, you’ll build useful and fun example applications that you can modify for your own situations. These range from simple, fun applications to liven up discussions to useful, data-driven apps to help you make decisions quickly and manage work.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Slack

This book will enable a beginner to create their own Slack bot either for amusement or professional purposes.

The ultimate goal of this book is for you to think of Slack as a development platform with great potential, rather than simply a chat client. As Slack continues its meteoric rise in popularity in the developer community, the possibilities and opportunities contained in Slack apps will prove to be a valuable tool in any developer's toolbox.

In this chapter, we introduce you to Slack and its possibilities. We will cover:

  • An introduction to Slack

  • Slack as a platform

  • The end goal