A Decade of Automating the Boring Stuff With Python

What goes into updating one of the most popular books about working with Python? After a decade of changes in the Python landscape, what projects, libraries, and skills are relevant to an office worker? This week on the show, we speak with previous guest Al Sweigart about the third edition of “Automate the Boring Stuff With Python.”

Al shares his thoughts on teaching Python and writing books over the past decade. In this third edition, he shares several new projects and updates to existing ones. We discuss Python tools for transcription, text-to-speech, notifications, and data storage.

We talk about the importance of debugging and improvements to Python error messages. He also shares a collection of resources, including conference talks, small projects, and Python libraries.

Course Spotlight: Exploring Scopes and Closures in Python

In this Code Conversation video course, you’ll take a deep dive into how scopes and closures work in Python. To do this, you’ll use a debugger to walk through some sample code, and then you’ll take a peek under the hood to see how Python holds variables internally.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction 00:01:46 – The Recurse Center and scrollart.org 00:05:11 – Third Edition of Automate the Boring Stuff With Python 00:07:32 – The types of projects covered in the new edition 00:09:44 – What was the original page count? 00:11:00 – Learning Python and it being perceived as magic 00:12:00 – PyCon US 2025 - Make Python Talk and Listen 00:14:22 – Text-to-speech with pyttsx3 00:19:31 – Generating notifications and messages with ntfy.sh 00:22:09 – Exploring SQLite 00:28:26 – Teaching enough to start building 00:31:03 – The Recursive Book of Recursion 00:32:45 – Do you see a change in the audience of Python learners 00:35:36 – Expectations put upon a new Python learner 00:40:28 – What changes has 10 years inspired for the book? 00:43:40 – Teaching things in a new order and debugging 00:47:31 – Video Course Spotlight 00:48:56 – Including simple projects 00:54:12 – Book release timeframe and pre-orders 00:58:26 – In-line metadata for Python script sharing 00:59:33 – What are you excited about in the world of Python? 01:01:56 – What do you want to learn next? 01:04:34 – How can people follow your work online? 01:05:19 – Thanks and goodbye

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