The LAST THING YOU NEED is another book on business, and you probably have no desire to become a Python programmer, either. I don’t blame you. The best business books out there combine a couple of pages of good ideas with hundreds of pages of filler, while the worst are written by complete morons trying to sell their “systems” for success. Who has time for that? As for Python, up until five years ago, it never crossed my radar, and even when I began exploring it, I had no intention of being a serious developer. (In fact, I’m still not a serious Python developer, and if you are hoping to become one, this is probably NOT the book for you.)
AN AMAZING THING happened to me in the past five years while working for various Swiss banks. Starting with just the basics, I found that when tackling certain problems, I could be significantly more effective with Python than with the standard office tools available. So much more effective, in fact, that trying to tackle those problems without Python felt like making fire by rubbing sticks together. Some tasks would have been impossible without it, other tasks, though possible, would have been tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. No one enjoys those kinds of tasks; Python helped me tackle them with élan.
THIS BOOK TELLS MY STORY. Without revealing client names or industry secrets, I paint a window into a world of the blind, where a one-eyed man can thrive. I also cover the basics of Python that anyone who is comfortable with Excel formulas will be able to grasp, and I do it by example – examples that you can easily adapt to your own work as needed.
LIKE YOU, I AM A BUSINESS PROFESSIONAL trying to make my way in this crazy world, be a good father to my two sons, and a good husband to my wife. I have a degree in engineering, another in business administration, a CFA charter, and various certificates in topics from Agile methodology to risk management. Against this broad background, Python has become one of my favorite tools, right alongside Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Give it a chance, and it might become one of yours, too!
WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK from the book's Introduction:
Five years ago, I came to business consulting after spending a decade working for smaller financial companies. I had a real stroke of luck when a colleague turned me on to one of the most powerful software tools ever created: Python. Since then, my practical experience with this language and its vast libraries has given me one reason after another to be amazed, even astonished.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how little Python is known in the business community. Time and again, I have seen executives, employees, and fellow consultants struggling with relatively simple problems which they are trying to solve with complex, error-prone database queries, inscrutable Excel sheets, and gobs of proverbial elbow grease.
It is as if I am watching people try to make fire by rubbing sticks together, while I am carrying a military-grade flamethrower in my pocket. Amazingly, this flamethrower is also widely available for my colleagues to use, but instead they choose to keep on rubbing their sticks because they just don’t know any better.
I wouldn’t have picked up the Python flamethrower either, had it not been for the friendly push I received. But looking back, I see that this tool has transformed my work in ways I never could have predicted, as documented in the many true-life stories within this partially autobiographical book. More than that, I provide you, the reader, with all the detail needed to do the same, in the form of explanations and – importantly – examples that you can apply to your own challenges.
