<story><title>Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (2015)</title><url>https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>calderarrow</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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?&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 :).</text></comment>
<story><title>Automate the Boring Stuff with Python (2015)</title><url>https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>monkeydust</author><text>Got hardcopy of this book for Xmas from my 3 year old (yea OK the wife!) about a 1&amp;#x2F;3 into it.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Anyway highly recommend this book for non programmers, MU is also a very nice and clean IDE but prefer VS Code.</text></comment>