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.

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Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Sections
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
Let Us Begin Our Automation Journey
Let Us Begin Our Automation Journey
Introduction
Creating a virtual environment
Installing third-party packages
Creating strings with formatted values
Manipulating strings
Extracting data from structured strings
Using a third-party tool—parse
Introducing regular expressions
Going deeper into regular expressions
Adding command-line arguments
2
Automating Tasks Made Easy
Automating Tasks Made Easy
Introduction
Preparing a task
Setting up a cron job
Capturing errors and problems
Sending email notifications
3
Building Your First Web Scraping Application
Building Your First Web Scraping Application
Introduction
Downloading web pages
Parsing HTML
Crawling the web
Subscribing to feeds
Accessing web APIs
Interacting with forms
Using Selenium for advanced interaction
Accessing password-protected pages
Speeding up web scraping
4
Searching and Reading Local Files
Searching and Reading Local Files
Introduction
Crawling and searching directories
Reading text files
Dealing with encodings
Reading CSV files
Reading log files
Reading file metadata
Reading images
Reading PDF files
Reading Word documents
Scanning documents for a keyword
5
Generating Fantastic Reports
Generating Fantastic Reports
Introduction
Creating a simple report in plain text
Using templates for reports
Formatting text in Markdown
Writing a basic Word document
Styling a Word document
Generating structure in Word documents
Adding pictures to Word documents
Writing a simple PDF document
Structuring a PDF
Aggregating PDF reports
Watermarking and encrypting a PDF
6
Fun with Spreadsheets
Fun with Spreadsheets
Introduction
Writing a CSV spreadsheet
Updating the CSV files
Reading an Excel spreadsheet
Updating an Excel spreadsheet
Creating new sheets on an Excel spreadsheet
Creating charts in Excel
Working with format in Excel
Creating a macro in LibreOffice
7
Developing Stunning Graphs
Developing Stunning Graphs
Introduction
Plotting a simple sales graph
Drawing stacked bars
Plotting pie charts
Displaying multiple lines
Drawing a scatter plot
Visualizing maps
Adding legends and annotations
Combining graphs
Saving charts
8
Dealing with Communication Channels
Dealing with Communication Channels
Introduction
Working with email templates
Sending an individual email
Reading an email
Adding subscribers to an email newsletter
Sending notifications via email
Producing SMS
Receiving SMS
Creating a Telegram bot
9
Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign?
Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign?
Introduction
Detecting the opportunities
Creating personalized coupon codes
Sending a notification to the customer on their preferred channel
Preparing sales information
Generating a sales report
10
Debugging Techniques
Debugging Techniques
Introduction
Learning Python interpreter basics
Debugging through logging
Debugging with breakpoints
Improving your debugging skills
11
Other Books You May Enjoy
Other Books You May Enjoy
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Preparing a task

It all starts with defining exactly what task needs to be run, and designing it in a way that doesn't require human intervention to run.

Some ideal characteristic points are as follows:

  1. Single, clear entry point: No confusion on what the task to run is.
  2. Clear parameters: If there are any parameters, they should be very explicit.
  3. No interactivity: Stopping the execution to request information from the user is not possible.
  4. The result should be stored: To be able to be checked at a different time than when it runs.
  5. Clear result: If we are working interactively in a result, we accept more verbose results, or progress reports. But, for an automated task, the final result should be as concise and to the point as possible.
  6. Errors should be logged: To analyze what went wrong.

A command-line program has a lot of those characteristics already. It has a clear way...

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