Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
About the Author
About the Technical Reviewer
BRIEF CONTENTS
CONTENTS IN DETAIL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
	Whom Is This Book For?
	Conventions
	What Is Programming?
	About This Book
	Downloading and Installing Python
	Downloading and Installing Mu
	Starting Mu
	Starting IDLE
	The Interactive Shell
	Installing Third-Party Modules
	How to Find Help
	Asking Smart Programming Questions
	Summary
PART I: PYTHON PROGRAMMING BASICS
1 PYTHON BASICS
	Entering Expressions into the Interactive Shell
	The Integer, Floating-Point, and String Data Types
	String Concatenation and Replication
	Storing Values in Variables
	Your First Program
	Dissecting Your Program
	Summary
	Practice Questions
2 FLOW CONTROL
	Boolean Values
	Comparison Operators
	Boolean Operators
	Mixing Boolean and Comparison Operators
	Elements of Flow Control
	Program Execution
	Flow Control Statements
	Importing Modules
	Ending a Program Early with the sys.exit() Function
	A Short Program: Guess the Number
	A Short Program: Rock, Paper, Scissors
	Summary
	Practice Questions
3 FUNCTIONS
	def Statements with Parameters
	Return Values and return Statements
	The None Value
	Keyword Arguments and the print() Function
	The Call Stack
	Local and Global Scope
	The global Statement
	Exception Handling
	A Short Program: Zigzag
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
4 LISTS
	The List Data Type
	Working with Lists
	Augmented Assignment Operators
	Methods
	Example Program: Magic 8 Ball with a List
	Sequence Data Types
	References
	A Short Program: Conway’s Game of Life
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
5 DICTIONARIES AND STRUCTURING DATA
	The Dictionary Data Type
	Pretty Printing
	Using Data Structures to Model Real-World Things
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
6 MANIPULATING STRINGS
	Working with Strings
	Putting Strings Inside Other Strings
	Useful String Methods
	Numeric Values of Characters with the ord() and chr() Functions
	Copying and Pasting Strings with the pyperclip Module
	Project: Multi-Clipboard Automatic Messages
	Project: Adding Bullets to Wiki Markup
	A Short Progam: Pig Latin
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
PART II: AUTOMATING TASKS
7 PATTERN MATCHING WITH REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
	Finding Patterns of Text Without Regular Expressions
	Finding Patterns of Text with Regular Expressions
	More Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions
	Greedy and Non-greedy Matching
	The findall() Method
	Character Classes
	Making Your Own Character Classes
	The Caret and Dollar Sign Characters
	The Wildcard Character
	Review of Regex Symbols
	Case-Insensitive Matching
	Substituting Strings with the sub() Method
	Managing Complex Regexes
	Combining re.IGNORECASE, re.DOTALL, and re.VERBOSE
	Project: Phone Number and Email Address Extractor
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
8 INPUT VALIDATION
	The PyInputPlus Module
	Project: How to Keep an Idiot Busy for Hours
	Project: Multiplication Quiz
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
9 READING AND WRITING FILES
	Files and File Paths
	The File Reading/Writing Process
	Saving Variables with the shelve Module
	Saving Variables with the pprint.pformat() Function
	Project: Generating Random Quiz Files
	Project: Updatable Multi-Clipboard
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
10 ORGANIZING FILES
	The shutil Module
	Walking a Directory Tree
	Compressing Files with the zipfile Module
	Project: Renaming Files with American-Style Dates to European-Style Dates
	Project: Backing Up a Folder into a ZIP File
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
11 DEBUGGING
	Raising Exceptions
	Getting the Traceback as a String
	Assertions
	Logging
	Mu’s Debugger
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Project
12 WEB SCRAPING
	Project: mapIt.py with the webbrowser Module
	Downloading Files from the Web with the requests Module
	Saving Downloaded Files to the Hard Drive
	HTML
	Parsing HTML with the bs4 Module
	Project: Opening All Search Results
	Project: Downloading All XKCD Comics
	Controlling the Browser with the selenium Module
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
13 WORKING WITH EXCEL SPREADSHEETS
	Excel Documents
	Installing the openpyxl Module
	Reading Excel Documents
	Project: Reading Data from a Spreadsheet
	Writing Excel Documents
	Project: Updating a Spreadsheet
	Setting the Font Style of Cells
	Font Objects
	Formulas
	Adjusting Rows and Columns
	Charts
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
14 WORKING WITH GOOGLE SHEETS
	Installing and Setting Up EZSheets
	Spreadsheet Objects
	Sheet Objects
	Working with Google Sheets Quotas
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
15 WORKING WITH PDF AND WORD DOCUMENTS
	PDF Documents
	Project: Combining Select Pages from Many PDFs
	Word Documents
	Creating PDFs from Word Documents
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
16 WORKING WITH CSV FILES AND JSON DATA
	The csv Module
	Project: Removing the Header from CSV Files
	JSON and APIs
	The json Module
	Project: Fetching Current Weather Data
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Project
17 KEEPING TIME, SCHEDULING TASKS, AND LAUNCHING PROGRAMS
	The time Module
	Rounding Numbers
	Project: Super Stopwatch
	The datetime Module
	Review of Python’s Time Functions
	Multithreading
	Project: Multithreaded XKCD Downloader
	Launching Other Programs from Python
	Project: Simple Countdown Program
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
18 SENDING EMAIL AND TEXT MESSAGES
	Sending and Receiving Email with the Gmail API
	SMTP
	Sending Email
	IMAP
	Retrieving and Deleting Emails with IMAP
	Project: Sending Member Dues Reminder Emails
	Sending Text Messages with SMS Email Gateways
	Sending Text Messages with Twilio
	Project: “Just Text Me” Module
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
19 MANIPULATING IMAGES
	Computer Image Fundamentals
	Manipulating Images with Pillow
	Project: Adding a Logo
	Drawing on Images
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
20 CONTROLLING THE KEYBOARD AND MOUSE WITH GUI AUTOMATION
	Installing the pyautogui Module
	Setting Up Accessibility Apps on macOS
	Staying on Track
	Controlling Mouse Movement
	Controlling Mouse Interaction
	Planning Your Mouse Movements
	Working with the Screen
	Image Recognition
	Getting Window Information
	Controlling the Keyboard
	Setting Up Your GUI Automation Scripts
	Review of the PyAutoGUI Functions
	Project: Automatic Form Filler
	Displaying Message Boxes
	Summary
	Practice Questions
	Practice Projects
A INSTALLING THIRD-PARTY MODULES
	The pip Tool
	Installing Third-Party Modules
	Installing Modules for the Mu Editor
B RUNNING PROGRAMS
	Running Programs from the Terminal Window
	Running Python Programs on Windows
	Running Python Programs on macOS
	Running Python Programs on Ubuntu Linux
	Running Python Programs with Assertions Disabled
C ANSWERS TO THE PRACTICE QUESTIONS
	Chapter 1
	Chapter 2
	Chapter 3
	Chapter 4
	Chapter 5
	Chapter 6
	Chapter 7
	Chapter 8
	Chapter 9
	Chapter 10
	Chapter 11
	Chapter 12
	Chapter 13
	Chapter 14
	Chapter 15
	Chapter 16
	Chapter 17
	Chapter 18
	Chapter 19
	Chapter 20
INDEX