This was the book that got me into programming. About three years ago, I was an auditor looking for ways to automate the more mundane tasks of my job, and stumbled a across this book.<p>I had no prior experience with programming, and at the time I only wanted to learn how to write enough code to help me with my job. This book was perfect for that goal.<p>It took me a couple of weeks to get through it all and write the program I needed to write, but when it worked, I was amazed. I remember going to grab coffee to celebrate and on my walk I started thinking about other job tasks I could automate. Most of public accounting deals with comparing PDF reports and Excel data, so I genuinely believed I could write programs to automate the majority of tasks at my job.<p>I started to learn on my own with some common online resources. I would get so excited to come home from work so I could dive further into my studies, and the more I learned, the more opportunities I saw: what if there was a way for a computer to perform all the analysis and statistical processing for an audit? What if a program could monitor financial transactions and automatically complete taxes for clients?<p>Flash forward a few months and I went all-in on software development. Quit my job as a public accountant, finished a boot camp, and started working as a developer.<p>It was the best decision of my life and this book was the catalyst. I’m so grateful that Al wrote this, and I highly recommend it for people whose jobs have a lot of boring stuff —- especially public accountants :).
I started reading this book this week in an effort to open up my job prospects down the line. I'm a "technical" Industrial Engineer often serving as a liason between IT and the business. I can program in VBA and do anything you can name in Excel, but I want to move to a more programming oriented role down the line.<p>I want to be able to do statistical analysis, queries, and just "be better" at breaking down a problem into easily solvable steps.<p>I'm using this book as a "learn the basics" stepping stone, and Project Euler as a list of solvable problems which will let me practice solving problems. After that I'll move into some personal projects I have in mind.<p>Does anyone have additional book or resource recommendations beyond that? I know packages like NumPy and/or SciPy will be useful down the line.<p>* Codecademy feels overpriced at $40/month or $250/year (no refunds for using a partial year).<p>* Google Python class was free but about 10 years old. With the Python 2->3 debacle, I was unsure if fundamentals had changed and hesitant to sink my time into it.<p>* Lynda runs $25 or $40/month but would offer python as well as many other resources.<p>* Udemy - has a number of courses including one by Al, the author of this book. Looked like it'd be a good value, but I'm not sure how much more value the videos add than the book.
Got hardcopy of this book for Xmas from my 3 year old (yea OK the wife!) about a 1/3 into it.<p>Have programmed c++ about a decade ago.. Nice to get back into it I have to say, there is an instant gratification from solving something in code, perhaps is the binary nature of something working or not, it's very black and white versus dealing with management issues, which is more like my day job, where your constantly in some grey area or dealing with noise, emails, endless directionless meetings.<p>Anyway highly recommend this book for non programmers, MU is also a very nice and clean IDE but prefer VS Code.
I love this book! I bought the physical copy years ago and it has frequently been a go-to book of mine. So many tech books (not all, of course) either do a great job of theory but are of little immediate, practical value <i>or</i> they are "cookbook" style and give you lots of useful tidbits but fail to help you grasp the big picture. While there are valid reasons for both of these approaches, of course, this gem is one of the few that are able to do both in one text. You learn a new computer language in the first part, and as soon as you have a foundation in the basics, you immediately jump into practical applications that can benefit your life almost immediately. Very well done, IMHO.
Aww I wrote the Python docx module years ago when I first got into programming as a sysadmin (I was doing lots of xml munging so knew lxml pretty well at the time). Nice to see it included in a guide like this.
The problem with automating 'every day stuff' is that processes aren't formalized in most cases. So there isn't an interface to implement against. There are no clear or reliable sources of data. Management needs to understand the issue, and if it doesn't there isn't much you can do as a single individual. So I more and more often tend to ask myself, if it is really feasible to automate task X.
Honest question -<p>I'm very familiar with Ruby and for my automation tasks I tend to use it almost exclusively. Of these, is there anything that -<p>1. Ruby can't do<p>2. Or is more complex / complicated to do in Ruby
I’m right there with ya calderarrow. I’m a middle aged physician with no prior programming experience, but I picked this book up on a whim a few years ago and it changed my life. I started automating little thing a here and there and now I see opportunities everywhere that a “real developer” could capitalize on. For as expensive as EMR’s are, you will NEVER meet a doctor who loves theirs, they just hate some less than others. Patient portals are even worse. This industry is ripe for disruption.
Discussed at the time:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415891" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9415891</a>