Automate the Boring Stuff Workbook

by Al Sweigart

Fall 2025, 256 pp.

ISBN-13:

9781718504509

Al Sweigart’s classic coding book Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, now in its third edition, has taught more than half a million readers how to dispense with tedious tasks using the Python programming language.

In this hands-on companion workbook, Sweigart gives those readers — and any Python programming beginner — hundreds of new ways to practice what they’ve learned. Through a wide variety of exercises, readers will test their understanding of programming concepts, face down tricky challenges, and explore use cases of common techniques.

The workbook’s creative projects encourage readers to build games, animations, and digital tools, offering novel ways to think about Python’s applications in their everyday life. Covers Python 3.x and its ecosystem of third-party libraries.

Author Bio

Al Sweigart is a professional software developer who teaches programming to kids and adults. Sweigart has written several bestselling programming books for beginners, including Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, Cracking Codes with Python, and Coding with Minecraft, as well as those for intermediate-level programmers, like Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python and The Recursive Book of Recursion (all from No Starch Press).

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1: Python Basics
Chapter 2: if-else and Flow Control
Chapter 3: Loops
Chapter 4: Functions
Chapter 5: Debugging
Chapter 6: Lists
Chapter 7: Dictionaries and Structuring Data
Chapter 8: Strings and Text Editing
Chapter 9: Text Pattern Matching With Regular Expressions
Chapter 10: Reading and Writing Files
Chapter 11: Organizing Files
Chapter 12: Designing and Deploying Command Line Programs
Chapter 13: Web Scraping
Chapter 14: Working with Excel Spreadsheets
Chapter 15: Working with Google Sheets
Chapter 16: SQLite Databases
Chapter 17: PDF and Word Documents
Chapter 18: CSV, JSON, and XML Files
Chapter 19: Keeping Time, Scheduling Tasks, and Launching Programs
Chapter 20: Sending Email, Texts, and Push Notifications
Chapter 21: Making Graphs and Manipulating Images
Chapter 22: Recognizing Text in Images
Chapter 22: Controlling Keyboard and Mouse
Chapter 24: Text-To-Speech and Speech Recognition Engines

Answers

The chapters in red are included in this Early Access PDF.