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)

Capturing errors and problems

An automated task's main characteristic is its fire-and-forget quality. We are not actively looking at the result, but making it run in the background.

Also, as most of the recipes in this book deal with external information, such as web pages or other reports, the likelihood of finding an unexpected problem when running it is high. This recipe will present an automated task that will safely store unexpected behaviors in a log file that can be checked afterwards.

Getting ready

As a starting point, we'll use a task that will divide two numbers, as described in the command line.

This task is very similar to the one presented in Step 5 in the How to do it… section, but instead of...