Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

by Jaime Buelta
Released May 2020
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781800207080

Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial.

O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial

Book description

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. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Get in touch
  2. Let's Begin Our Automation Journey
    1. Activating a virtual environment
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    2. Installing third-party packages
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    3. Creating strings with formatted values
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    4. Manipulating strings
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    5. Extracting data from structured strings
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    6. Using a third-party tool—parse
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    7. Introducing regular expressions
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
    8. Going deeper into regular expressions
      1. How to do it…
      2. How it works…
      3. There's more…
      4. See also
    9. Adding command-line arguments
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it…
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more…
      5. See also
  3. Automating Tasks Made Easy
    1. Preparing a task
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works…
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Setting up a cron job
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Capturing errors and problems
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Sending email notifications
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  4. Building Your First Web Scraping Application
    1. Downloading web pages
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Parsing HTML
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Crawling the web
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Subscribing to feeds
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Accessing web APIs
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Interacting with forms
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Using Selenium for advanced interaction
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    8. Accessing password-protected pages
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    9. Speeding up web scraping
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  5. Searching and Reading Local Files
    1. Crawling and searching directories
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Reading text files
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Dealing with encodings
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Reading CSV files
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Reading log files
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Reading file metadata
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Reading images
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    8. Reading PDF files
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    9. Reading Word documents
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    10. Scanning documents for a keyword
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  6. Generating Fantastic Reports
    1. Creating a simple report in plain text
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Using templates for reports
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Formatting text in Markdown
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Writing a basic Word document
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Styling a Word document
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Generating structure in Word documents
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Adding pictures to Word documents
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    8. Writing a simple PDF document
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    9. Structuring a PDF
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    10. Aggregating PDF reports
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    11. Watermarking and encrypting a PDF
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  7. Fun with Spreadsheets
    1. Writing a CSV spreadsheet
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Updating CSV files
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Reading an Excel spreadsheet
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Updating an Excel spreadsheet
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Creating new sheets in an Excel spreadsheet
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Creating charts in Excel
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Working with cell formats in Excel
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    8. Creating a macro in LibreOffice
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  8. Cleaning and Processing Data
    1. Preparing a CSV spreadsheet
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Appending currency based on location
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Standardizing the date format
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Aggregating results
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Process data in parallel
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Process data with Pandas
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  9. Developing Stunning Graphs
    1. Plotting a simple sales graph
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Drawing stacked bars
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Plotting pie charts
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Displaying multiple lines
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Drawing a scatter plot
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Visualizing maps
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Adding legends and annotations
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    8. Combining graphs
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    9. Saving charts
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  10. Dealing with Communication Channels
    1. Working with email templates
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    2. Sending an individual email
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Reading an email
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Adding subscribers to an email newsletter
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Sending notifications via email
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Producing SMS messages
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Receiving SMS
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    8. Creating a Telegram bot
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  11. Why Not Automate Your Marketing Campaign?
    1. Introduction
    2. Detecting opportunities
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Creating personalized coupon codes
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Sending a notification to a customer on their preferred channel
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Preparing sales information
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Generating a sales report
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  12. Machine Learning for Automation
    1. Introduction
    2. Analyzing images with Google Cloud Vision AI
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Extracting text from images with Google Cloud Vision AI
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Analyzing text with Google Cloud Natural Language
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Creating your own custom machine learning model to classify text
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  13. Automatic Testing Routines
    1. Introduction
    2. Writing and executing test cases
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    3. Testing external code
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Testing using dependency mocking
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Testing using HTTP call mocking
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    6. Preparing testing scenarios
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    7. Running tests selectively
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  14. Debugging Techniques
    1. Introduction
    2. Learning Python interpreter basics
      1. How to do it...
      2. How it works...
      3. There's more...
      4. See also
    3. Debugging through logging
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    4. Debugging with breakpoints
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
    5. Improving your debugging skills
      1. Getting ready
      2. How to do it...
      3. How it works...
      4. There's more...
      5. See also
  15. Other Books You May Enjoy
  16. Index

Product information

  • Title: Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition
  • Author(s): Jaime Buelta
  • Release date: May 2020
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781800207080