Python Automation Cookbook: 75 Python automation ideas for web scraping, data wrangling, and processing Excel, reports, emails, and more, 2nd Edition

Get a firm grip on the core processes including browser automation, web scraping, Word, Excel, and GUI automation with Python 3.8 and higher

Key Features

• Automate integral business processes such as report generation, email marketing, and lead generation
• Explore automated code testing and Python’s growth in data science and AI automation in three new chapters
• Understand techniques to extract information and generate appealing graphs, and reports with Matplotlib

Book Description

In this updated and extended version of Python Automation Cookbook, each chapter now comprises the newest recipes and is revised to align with Python 3.8 and higher. The book includes three new chapters that focus on using Python for test automation, machine learning projects, and for working with messy data.

This edition will enable you to develop a sharp understanding of the fundamentals required to automate business processes through real-world tasks, such as developing your first web scraping application, analyzing information to generate spreadsheet reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails.

Once you grasp the basics, you will acquire the practical knowledge to create stunning graphs and charts using Matplotlib, generate rich graphics with relevant information, automate marketing campaigns, build machine learning projects, and execute debugging techniques.

By the end of this book, you will be proficient in identifying monotonous tasks and resolving process inefficiencies to produce superior and reliable systems.

What you will learn

• Learn data wrangling with Python and Pandas for your data science and AI projects
• Automate tasks such as text classification, email filtering, and web scraping with Python
• Use Matplotlib to generate a variety of stunning graphs, charts, and maps
• Automate a range of report generation tasks, from sending SMS and email campaigns to creating templates, adding images in Word, and even encrypting PDFs
• Master web scraping and web crawling of popular file formats and directories with tools like Beautiful Soup
• Build cool projects such as a Telegram bot for your marketing campaign, a reader from a news RSS feed, and a machine learning model to classify emails to the correct department based on their content
• Create fire-and-forget automation tasks by writing cron jobs, log files, and regexes with Python scripting

Who this book is for

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition is for developers, data enthusiasts or anyone who wants to automate monotonous manual tasks related to business processes such as finance, sales, and HR, among others. Working knowledge of Python is all you need to get started with this book.

Table of Contents

1. Let's Begin Our Automation Journey
2. Automating Tasks Made Easy
3. Building Your First Web Scraping Application
4. Searching and Reading Local Files
5. Generating Fantastic Reports
6. Fun with Spreadsheets
7. Cleaning and Processing Data
8. Developing Stunning Graphs
9. Dealing with Communication Channels
10. Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign?
11. Machine Learning for Automation
12. Automatic Testing Routines
13. Debugging Techniques

Jaime Buelta is a Software Architect who has been a professional programmer since 2002 and a Python enthusiast since 2010. He has developed software for a variety of fields, focusing, in the last 10 years, on developing web services in Python in the gaming, finance and education industries. He is a strong proponent of automating everything to make computers do most of the heavy lifting, so humans can focus on the important stuff. He published his first book, "Python Automation Cookbook", in 2018 (recently with an extended second edition), followed a year later by "Hands-On Docker for Microservices with Python" describing how to migrate to a microservice architecture. He is currently living in Dublin, Ireland, and is a regular speaker at PyCon Ireland.