A series of workshops for MADE employees to automate everyday computer tasks using the online, free course 'Automate The Boring Stuff' (https://automatetheboringstuff.com/) by Al Sweigart.
The workshops are split into the first 3 lessons being for Beginners - colleauges with no or minimal previous Python or programming experience, who would like to get their head around the foundation of programming with Python. Then there are 2 lessons for Intermediate level programmers - people who know the basics of Python or other programming languages and would like to learn about web scraping and spreadsheet manipulation with Python.
You'll find that all of the 'Automate The Boring Stuff' chapters referred to in this course include a corresponding YouTube video that contain the same content as the text, so feel free to use whichever works best for you.
"Lesson 0?" I hear you ask yourself. Why start counting from zero? The answer to this question will help you to
understand some important fundamentals of programming and Python, and an in-depth answer will be found in Lesson 2 - Data Structures when we talk about lists.
But here's the short-ish answer; computer programming is all about efficiency, and the reason for this set of
workshops - to help colleagues learn Python, and hopefully, make efficiencies within their jobs for the benefit of
themselves and MADE (an inspiring read on this topic can be found on
https://www.wired.com/story/coders-efficiency-is-beautiful). So, with efficiency in mind, when looking at a list of
colours ["red", "blue, "green", "yellow"] at what position would you say is the colour red? You'd assume the answer
would be 1 right? Well in programming and Python terms, that wouldn't be correct. The colour red is actually in
position 0. That is because when looking at the list, we will start in its first position, and do not have to move to
find red. If this doesn't make sense right away, I hope it will after Lesson 2.
The first 2 chapters of 'Automate The Boring Stuff' discuss how to setup Python on your computer, and the basics of the language. Please read through these chapters, setup Python if you don't have it already and try out all of the examples in your Python console or IDLE.
Chapter 0 - An introduction to setting up your computer with Python and the software required
Chapter 1 - The basics of the Python programming language (expressions, integers, strings and variables)
Knowing how to read the flow of code, and control it yourself, is vital in programming. Some computer programs can be read top to bottom, others are distributed between multiple files and groups of code lines. This lesson should help you in starting to understand these concepts and techniques.
Again, read through the 2 chapters below and try out the examples. If you come across errors, double check the code you have written, as someone else to check it looks correct or break the problem down line by line, to ensure everything you think is working, is.
Chapter 2 - Controlling the flow of programs (booleans, comparison operators, conditions, if statements, while loops, for loops, importing modules)
Chapter 3 - What are functions, global and local scope and exception handling
Lesson #2! You're half way through the Beginner level lessons for this course, well done!! Today we will be looking at what programmers call "data structures" which is a posh way of saying "data grouped together in a particular way".
This will include lists which are values that contains other values in a particular order, such as a list of integers
i.e. [1, 3, 5, 7]. We also have tuples which are similar to lists, but their subtle differences will be explained.
Last but not least, dictionaries, again a collection of values but with more useful ways of identifying data within them
using "keys". Read on dear colleague, and all will be revealed...
Chapter 4 - The list and tuple data types and methods
Chapter 5 - The dictionary data type and structuring data with them
In programming we refer to text values as "strings", this is because in dawn of programming, this term was used to describe a series of numbers or words, a "string of 1s". Moving on, text is extremely useful as input and output in computer programs, so let's see how Python can let us play with strings.
Chapter 6 - Working with strings and useful string methods
Chapter 7 - Searching strings for patterns using regular expressions
This lesson is intended for any Intermediate level programmers who have skipped the Beginner course, but would like to
brush up on their basic Python skills (if you have just completed the Beginner course, please feel free to go through
any areas you found difficult, or skipping ahead to Lesson 4).
I would recommend skimming through the first 6 chapters 'Automate The Boring Stuff' and answering the questions at the end of the chapters.
Chapter 0 - An introduction to setting up your computer with Python and the software required
Chapter 1 - The basics of the Python programming language (expressions, integers, strings and variables)
Chapter 2 - Controlling the flow of programs (booleans, comparison operators, conditions, if statements, while loops, for loops, importing modules)
Chapter 3 - What are functions, global and local scope and exception handling
Chapter 4 - The list and tuple data types and methods
Chapter 5 - The dictionary data type and structuring data with them
Chapter 6 - Working with strings and useful string methods
The next 4 chapters are extremely useful to get the most out of these workshops, but that's a lot of reading, so they're not mandatory.
Chapter 7 - Searching strings for patterns using regular expressions
Chapter 8 - Reading and writing files
Chapter 9 - Copying, moving, renaming and compressing files
Chapter 10 - Debugging your code and fixing issues 🐛
I would also heavily recommend reading Appendix A which explains
installing third party modules - Python code that doesn't come as standard. This is done using the pip tool from the
command line i.e. running pip install selenium or pip install requests.
What the bloody hell is web scraping??? Do we take a shovel and start running it across our computer screens? Well obviously not, but it actually isn't that far from the analogy of shovelling data from a website into your own program. Web scraping is the term used to describe a program that downloads data from a website, processes it and produces an output. That output could be a report of all the products that a competitor is selling for cheaper, or any updates to a website since the program last ran.
Have a read of Chapter 11 from Automate The Boring Stuff and Al will
explain the webbrowser builtin module, opening web pages and downloading them, formatting web pages with Beautiful Soup and controlling websites using the Selenium Python module.
Given a weather reporting website of your choice, write a Python script that will print out today's temperature.
Top Tips:
- Breakdown the problem you have into small, manageable chunks that you understand.
- Then do the same with the solution that you are trying to create.
- Try not to get carried away with getting straight to the end result.
- i.e. How do I download a webpage? Then once that's done, how do I convert that file into a Beautiful Soup object?
Given a search term, write a Python script that will open the top 5 results from Bing in your web browser - I recommend Bing because the HTML structure of Google results has become more complicated since Al wrote his course.
Now we get onto the fun stuff! Writing programs that can interact with webpages 😱. In this task, use what you have learnt from Chapter 11 about Selenium to login to a social media account and post a message.
Top Tips:
- You'll need to download the
chromedriverfrom https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads which will allow Python to talk to your Chrome browser. - Make sure the
chromedriverversion matches the version of your Chrome application. - When creating the
browservariable, pass as a parameter to the Chrome initialiser the location of your file i.ebrowser = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="/Users/smistry/Downloads/chromedriver")
TBC