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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