Giridhar - Automate It! - 2017

Key Features

• Learn how to construct Python scripts to scrape data, manipulate files, and access websites' APIs
  
• Get to know about the different types of bots, look at how to develop a simple chat bot and how bots can be used to automate business processes
  
• This book is written in Python 3.5 syntax to future-proof your automation and you'll get an understanding of how to customize the scripts to meet your future automation needs
  

Book
This book gives you a great selection of recipes to automate your business processes with Python, and provides a platform for you to understand how Python is useful to make time consuming and repetitive business tasks more efficient. Python is a mature high level language, has object-oriented programming features, powers various apps, has a huge set of modules, and great community support. Python is extremely easy to use, can help you get complex tasks done efficiently and is an apt choice for our needs.
With a classic problem-solution based approach and real-world examples, you will delve into things that automate your business processes. You will begin by learning about the Python modules to work with Web, Worksheets, Presentations and PDFs. You'll leverage Python recipes to automate processes in HR, Finance and making them efficient and reliable. For instance, company payroll - an integral process in HR will be automated with Python recipes.
A few chapters of this book will also help you gain knowledge on working with bots and computer vision. You will learn how to build bots for automating business use cases by integrating artificial intelligence. You'll also understand how Python is helpful in face detection and building a scanner of your own. You will see how to effectively and easily use Python code to manage SMS and voice notifications, opening a world of possibilities using cloud telephony to solve your business needs. Moving forward, you will learn to work with APIs, Webhooks and Emails to automate Marketing and Customer Support processes. Finally, using the various Python libraries, this book will arm you with knowledge to customize data solutions and generate reports to meet your business needs.
This book will help you up-skill and make your business processes efficient with the various Python recipes covered in this book.

What You Will Learn

• Implement file deduplication and how to parse HTML content in Python.
  
• Study an example application that will enable you to work with spreadsheets
  
• Get acquainted with the Python modules used to work with e-mails
  
• Manipulate images using Pillow and schedule tasks with respect to time zones
  
• Use XML or JSON as a message format across distributed systems
  
• Develop a Python application with logging and see an example of debugging
  
• Integrate Python with Mongo and Redis databases
  
• Generate reports using Pandas
  

About the Author
Chetan Giridhar is a technology leader and an open source evangelist. He is the author of Learning Python Design Patterns, Second Edition, has been an invited speaker at international PyCon conferences, and is an associate editor at the Python Papers journal. He takes keen interest in platform engineering, distributed systems, mobile app development, and real-time cloud applications. You can take a look at his experiments at https://github.com/cjgiridhar and his website https://technobeans.com.
In his current role as the chief technology officer, Chetan owns the product strategy and drives technology for CallHub. Prior to CallHub, he was associated with BlueJeans Networks and NetApp, where he worked on cloud, video, and enterprise storage products.
Chetan believes that the world is full of knowledge; he's always curious to learn new things and share them with open source community, friends, and colleagues. You can connect with him on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjgiridhar).

Table of Contents

• Working with the Web
  
• Working with CSV and Excel Worksheets
  
• Getting Creative with PDF Files and Documents
  
• Playing with SMS and Voice Notifications
  
• Fun with E-mails
  
• Presentations and More
  
• Power of APIs
  
• Talking to Bots
  
• Imagining Images
  
• Data Analysis and Visualizations
  
• Time in the Zone