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It's a great title. "Automate the Boring Stuff" seems to be the direct replacement (more or less) of "programming" for me. Maybe people without programming expe

by leni536 12y ago

It's a great title. "Automate the Boring Stuff" seems to be the direct replacement (more or less) of "programming" for me. Maybe people without programming experience don't usually realize that programming is mostly about "automating the boring stuff". This title appeals for this simple "use case" which could win against the "scariness" of programming. Or maybe it's not that scary for people to learn programming if you don't mention the word "programming"? It doesn't seem to be the intention here, the first part's title is "The Basics of Python Programming". But it seems to be a good strategy to appeal with the title first than in the TOC face the reader with the truth: what you are going to read about is programming. I know, I speculate too much. But I really like this title. I can imagine a businessman in a bookstore at the "computer" section looking for Excel or Word books looking into this book, while filtering out all "programming" books in his vision.

jjp 12y ago
I agree the title is great, but unfortunately I fear that same business man will read the table of contents and go so what is the boring stuff that I can automate. I hope that the text brings to life some of the problems that the programming constructs can automate.
- AlSweigart 12y ago
  Author here. I'm hoping the back cover material will work, and the opening story in the first chapter is catchy enough: “You’ve just done in two hours what it takes the three of us two days to do.” My college roommate was working at a retail electronics store in the early 2000s. Occasionally, the store would receive a spreadsheet of thousands of product prices from its competitor. A team of three employees would print the spreadsheet onto a thick stack of paper and split it among themselves. For each product price, they would look up their store’s price and note all the products that their competitors sold for less. It usually took a couple of days. “You know, I could write a program to do that if you have the original file for the printouts,” my roommate told them, when he saw them sitting on the floor with papers scattered and stacked around them. After a couple of hours, he had a short program that read a competitor’s price from a file, found the product in the store’s database, and noted whether the competitor was cheaper. He was still new to programming, and he spent most of his time looking up documentation in a programming book. The actual program took only a few seconds to run. My roommate and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day.
  - prakashk 12y ago
    Hi Al, I looked for a way to send feedback on the site, but couldn't find anything. So, posting it here. On the menu of chapters (displayed when you click on the floating menu button on every page), the sorting is broken; lexical order instead of numerical order is being used. Thanks for writing this book and making it available under the Creative Commons License.

by leni536 12y ago

jjp 12y ago

I agree the title is great, but unfortunately I fear that same business man will read the table of contents and go so what is the boring stuff that I can automate. I hope that the text brings to life some of the problems that the programming constructs can automate.

AlSweigart 12y ago
Author here. I'm hoping the back cover material will work, and the opening story in the first chapter is catchy enough: “You’ve just done in two hours what it takes the three of us two days to do.” My college roommate was working at a retail electronics store in the early 2000s. Occasionally, the store would receive a spreadsheet of thousands of product prices from its competitor. A team of three employees would print the spreadsheet onto a thick stack of paper and split it among themselves. For each product price, they would look up their store’s price and note all the products that their competitors sold for less. It usually took a couple of days. “You know, I could write a program to do that if you have the original file for the printouts,” my roommate told them, when he saw them sitting on the floor with papers scattered and stacked around them. After a couple of hours, he had a short program that read a competitor’s price from a file, found the product in the store’s database, and noted whether the competitor was cheaper. He was still new to programming, and he spent most of his time looking up documentation in a programming book. The actual program took only a few seconds to run. My roommate and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day.
- prakashk 12y ago
  Hi Al, I looked for a way to send feedback on the site, but couldn't find anything. So, posting it here. On the menu of chapters (displayed when you click on the floating menu button on every page), the sorting is broken; lexical order instead of numerical order is being used. Thanks for writing this book and making it available under the Creative Commons License.