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.

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

Show Links:

• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 3rd Edition - No Starch Press
• The Recurse Center
• scrollart.org
• 20 GOTO 10: How to Make Scrolling ASCII Art - PyTexas 2024 - YouTube
• Episode #26: 5 Years Podcasting Python With Michael Kennedy: Growth, GIL, Async, and More
• whisper: Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision
• PyVideo.org - Al Sweigart
• pyttsx3: Offline Text To Speech Synthesis for Python
• pyttsx3 - PyPI
• tesseract: Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine
• Make Python Talk, Make Python Listen - PyCon US 2025
• yt-dlp: A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader
• ntfy.sh - Send push notifications to your phone via PUT/POST
• SQLite Home Page
• SQLite and SQLAlchemy in Python: Move Your Data Beyond Flat Files – video course
• The Recursive Book of Recursion - No Starch Press
• Al Sweigart: The Amazing Mutable, Immutable Tuple - YouTube
• Python Developers Survey 2023 Results
• Inline script metadata - Python Packaging User Guide
• PyCon US 2025
• Rust Programming Language
• Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart@mastodon.social) - Fosstodon
• Al Sweigart (@alsweigart.bsky.social) — Bluesky
• Invent with Python

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

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• SQLite and SQLAlchemy in Python: Move Your Data Beyond Flat Files

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