Python for Data and Automation

Description

Every office has a task that somebody repeats every week: collect a file, look up some prices, copy numbers into a spreadsheet, write the same paragraph, send the same message. This course teaches you to hand that work to a script, and, more importantly, to build scripts that other people can trust: scripts that log what they did, refuse bad input, survive a failing server and can be run twice without doubling anything.

You already write Python. Here you learn the tools that turn it into automation: portable file handling, structured files in their awkward real forms, pattern matching in text, dates and time zones, web APIs with pagination, retries and rate limits, HTML pages, Excel workbooks, templated reports with charts, e-mail, command-line tools, configuration, scheduling and safe re-runs.

What changes in your work

• Files and text: you find, sort, read and clean files of any encoding and layout, and pull values out of text with regular expressions instead of fragile string surgery.
• The web: you call APIs with the right parameters and credentials, fetch every page, retry only what can pass, respect rate limits, and read data from saved HTML pages.
• Documents: you produce Excel workbooks, charts, HTML and text reports from templates, and messages with attachments, and you test them against the data.
• Reliability: you give every script a command line, logging, settings kept outside the code, a dry-run mode, a schedule and a check that makes a second run harmless.

How it is taught

Each lesson starts from a situation in a small bookshop, explains the idea with its precise definition, a diagram and a worked example, and then proves it in code that you run and change. Every lesson closes with exercises with hints and a short summary. Nothing needs an account or the internet: a local practice server stands in for the supplier's API, a local mail server records the messages you build instead of sending them, and saved pages stand in for the shop floor's stock notes.

You work in your own editor and terminal, in a virtual environment, the way automation is built in real jobs. All outputs shown in the lessons were produced by running the code.

The project

You build the Weekly Report Automation for Maple Street Books. One command reads the weekly sales export, cleans it by written rules, fetches supplier prices from the API with pagination and retries, extracts stock notes from saved pages, builds an Excel workbook, two charts and an HTML and text report, and prepares and sends the message. It supports a dry run, refuses to repeat a finished week, cleans up after a failure and can be scheduled. A template repository with a suite of tests tells you which milestone you have finished, and a complete solution is there to compare with afterwards.

What is included

Lessons on files, structured data, text patterns and dates, web APIs and pages, spreadsheets, templates, charts and e-mail, and on command-line tools, logging, scheduling and safe repeatable scripts, the sales files and saved pages used in the exercises, the two local practice servers, a guided project with a template repository and a solution repository with tests, and a short quiz at the end of every module drawn from a larger question bank.

Who it is for

If you know the basics of Python and want it to do real work for you, this is the course that makes the difference between scripts that run once on your laptop and automation that runs every Monday without you. It suits analysts, office and operations staff, and anyone heading towards software engineering or data work who wants dependable habits from the start. Do not spend another hour on a task that a script can do: enroll now, build the pipeline, and end the course with a project that you can show to a colleague or an employer.