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)

Speeding up web scraping

Most of the time spent downloading information from web pages is usually spent waiting. A request goes from our computer to whatever server will process it, and until the response is composed and comes back to our computer, we cannot do much about it.

During the execution of the recipes in the book, you'll notice there's a wait involved in requests calls, normally of around one or two seconds. But computers can do other stuff while waiting, including making more requests at the same time. In this recipe, we will see how to download a list of pages in parallel and wait until they are all ready. We will use an intentionally slow server to show the point.

Getting ready

We'll get code to...