and his co-workers took an extra-long lunch that day this is the power of computer programming computer is like swiss army knife that you can configure for countless tasks many people spend hours clicking and typing to perform repetitive tasksunaware that the machine they're using could do their job in seconds if they gave it the right instructions whom is this book forsoftware is at the core of so many of the tools we use todaynearly everyone uses social networks to communicatemany people have internet-connected computers in their phonesand most office jobs involve interacting with computer to get work done as resultthe demand for people who can code has skyrocketed countless booksinteractive web tutorialsand developer boot camps promise to turn ambitious beginners into software engineers with six-figure salaries this book is not for those people it' for everyone else on its ownthis book won' turn you into professional software developer any more than few guitar lessons will turn you into rock star but if you're an office workeradministratoracademicor anyone else who uses computer for work or funyou will learn the basics of programming so that you can automate simple tasks such as thesemoving and renaming thousands of files and sorting them into folders filling out online forms--no typing required downloading files or copying text from website whenever it updates having your computer text you custom notifications updating or formatting excel spreadsheets checking your email and sending out prewritten responses these tasks are simple but time-consuming for humansand they're often so trivial or specific that there' no ready-made software to perform them armed with little bit of programming knowledgehoweveryou can have your computer do these tasks for you conventions this book is not designed as reference manualit' guide for beginners the coding style sometimes goes against best practices (for examplesome programs use global variables)but that' trade-off to make the code simpler to learn this book is made for people to write throwaway codeso there' not much time spent on style and elegance sophisticated programming concepts--like object-oriented programminglist comprehensionsand generators--aren' covered because of the complexity they xxviii introduction