Starting with a Boring Stuff

On my starting point in python three years ago, I was too excited, cannot hardly wait to jump into machine learning and geospatial analysis. In reality, after just starting with R as my first language few weeks earlier I was then stuck with pandas and numpy. Maybe that my excuse for missed this very good book in the first place.

Until few weeks back, when I was asked to give a webinar, a light tech talk, try to motivate people to start to learn how to code for the audience who is non IT related employee with no computer science back ground. I find the challenge is how to motivate people to spend their time and effort to learn how to code from scratch, what will be the carrot?

I try to relook into myself, after put aside all my codes that related to my pipeline domain corrosion data analytics and pipeline geospatial analysis the remaining are mostly related to pdf scrapper, spreadsheet manipulation, and some text extraction and manipulation, then I remember one my book in my google book library.

The author describe whom is this book for as : Countless books, interactive web tutorial, and developer boot camps promise to turn ambitious beginners into software engineer with six figure salaries. This book is not for those people. It is for everyone else.

The book divided into two parts; the first part consists an introduction to python. As the book was design for beginners, I find the first part quite gently introduce into python with focused into application in the next part. Starting from very beginning introduction, slowly flow into some basics, flow control, functions, lists, data structure and string manipulation.

Part two is where the real show begin, start with regular expression introduction and application, read and write a file, organizing file, web scrapping, working with excel spreadsheet, pdf, and word files, csv and JSON data and even up to time scheduled tasks, auto email and text messaging.

In my personal view, if you have not decide to start to learn python yet, whatever your background is, if your ever deal with pdf, spreadsheets, repetitive-tiring-boring task, then you have a very good reason to invest your time to learn python this way as it can safe a lot of your time in future, and your future self will be thank you for.

The authors Al Sweigart also shared the content of this book at https://automatetheboringstuff.com and even provide some tutorial on his youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/Albert10110