Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook

By : Jaime Buelta
Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

Have you been doing the same old monotonous office work over and over again? Or have you been trying to find an easy way to make your life better by automating some of your repetitive tasks? Through a tried and tested approach, understand how to automate all the boring stuff using Python. The Python Automation Cookbook helps you develop a clear understanding of how to automate your business processes using Python, including detecting opportunities by scraping the web, analyzing information to generate automatic spreadsheets reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. You’ll learn how to get notifications via text messages and run tasks while your mind is focused on other important activities, followed by understanding how to scan documents such as résumés. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the world of graphs, along with studying how to produce organized charts using Matplotlib. In addition to this, you’ll gain in-depth knowledge of how to generate rich graphics showing relevant information. By the end of this book, you’ll have refined your skills by attaining a sound understanding of how to identify and correct problems to produce superior and reliable systems.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Debugging through logging

Debugging is, after all, detecting what's going on inside our program and what unexpected or incorrect effects may be happening. A simple, yet very effective, approach is to output variables and other information at strategic parts of your code to follow the flow of the program.

The simplest form of this approach is called print debugging, or inserting print statements at certain points to print the value of variables or points while debugging.

But taking this technique a little bit further and combining it with the logging techniques presented in Chapter 2, Automating Tasks Made Easy allows us to create a semi-permanent trace of the execution of the program, which can be really useful when detecting issues in a running program.

Getting ready

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