Whom Is This Book For?
Software is at the core of so many of the tools we use today: Nearly everyone uses social networks to communicate, many people have Internet-connected computers in their phones, and most office jobs involve interacting with a computer to get work done. As a result, the demand for people who can code has skyrocketed. Countless books, interactive web tutorials, and developer boot camps promise to turn ambitious beginners into software engineers with six-figure salaries.
This book is not for those people. It’s for everyone else.
On its own, this book won’t turn you into a professional software developer any more than a few guitar lessons will turn you into a rock star. But if you’re an office worker, administrator, academic, or anyone else who uses a computer for work or fun, you will learn the basics of programming so that you can automate simple tasks such as the following:
- • Moving and renaming thousands of files and sorting them into folders
- • Filling out online forms, no typing required
- • Downloading files or copy text from a website whenever it updates
- • Having your computer text you custom notifications
- • Updating or formatting Excel spreadsheets
- • Checking your email and sending out prewritten responses
These tasks are simple but time-consuming for humans, and they’re often so trivial or specific that there’s no ready-made software to perform them. Armed with a little bit of programming knowledge, you can have your computer do these tasks for you.
Conventions
This book is not designed as a reference manual; it’s a guide for beginners. The coding style sometimes goes against best practices (for example, some programs use global variables), but that’s a trade-off to make the code simpler to learn. This book is made for people to write throwaway code, so there’s not much time spent on style and elegance. Sophisticated programming concepts—like object-oriented programming, list comprehensions,
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and generators—aren’t covered because of the complexity they add. Veteran programmers may point out ways the code in this book could be changed to improve efficiency, but this book is mostly concerned with getting programs to work with the least amount of effort.