Thu 09 November 2023

What's New in the 3rd Edition of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python"

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

The third edition is has new chapters, programming projects, and revised editing. The third party module coverage has been updated to the latest available version (including OpenPyXL). You can run pip install automateboringstuff3 to install the latest version of all modules covered in the book that are compatible with the book's code examples.

Updated June 20, 2025

Like the previous editions, the third edition is released under a Creative Commons license and will be free to read online.

Some of the new content includes:

  • Tips on how to use ChatGPT and other Large Language Model AIs to learn to code as well as common pitfalls to avoid.

  • Making your programs talk with text-to-speech libraries pyttsx3 and gTTS.

  • Speech recognition with OpenAI's Whisper library to create text transcriptions from audio and video files.

  • Doing OCR to extract text from images with PyTesseract.

  • Using the NAPS2 application to create PDFs from images with embedded OCRed text.

  • Downloading videos from YouTube and other video websites with yt-dlp.
  • Updated PDF operations using PyPDF and PdfMiner.

  • A complete introduction to SQLite and relational databases with Python's sqlite3 module.

  • How to compile Python scripts into executable programs with PyInstaller on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

  • Covering Playwright in addition to Selenium for controlling web browsers.

  • Sending push notifications to your phone with https://ntfy.sh

  • In addition to JSON and CVS formatted data, how to work with XML files as well.

  • Creating graphs with matplotlib.

  • Copying and pasting images to the clipboard with pyperclipimg.

  • The Humre module for making regular expressions easier to use.

If you have questions about the third edition or its content, you can post them on the /r/inventwithpython subreddit.


Check out other books by Al Sweigart, free online or available for purchase:

...and other books as well! Or register for the online video course. You can also donate to or support the author directly.