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Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming (Udemy.com)

A practical programming course for office workers, academics, and administrators who want to improve their productivity.

Created by: Al Sweigart

Last updated February 2023

Our take

Based on the ratings of 119,567 students, a sample of their written reviews and the syllabus, as the course stood in February 2023. No course pays to be reviewed.

Al Sweigart's course follows his free book of the same name. It is aimed at office workers, students and admins who want small scripts that save time, not a computer science education. It runs about 9.5 hours across 51 lectures. The first half covers the basics: flow control, functions, lists, dictionaries and strings. The second half moves into regular expressions, files, debugging, web scraping, Excel, Word and PDF files, email, and mouse and keyboard automation. No prior coding is needed.

Students praise the gentle start and the clear explanations. Reviewers say the pace is easy to follow, and one likes having the free book open alongside. Sweigart gets credit for making it enjoyable, and one student says following him beats reading the book alone. The complaints are consistent. Practice is thin, with two quizzes and no coding exercises, and one reviewer wanted small projects. One says the material felt rushed, another that the latter part was unclear, and one felt it plays more like a beginner Python course than an automation one.

The course was last updated in February 2023, and reviewers call parts of it dated, so expect to look up newer library behavior now and then. Still, it has over 1.1 million students and a 4.7 average from nearly 120,000 ratings, with roughly 60 percent of them five stars. It works as a first step for anyone whose goal is automating work tasks. Plan to invent a few small projects of your own, because the course will not hand them over.

Best forOffice workers and admins with no coding background who want to script Excel, PDFs and email.
Skip it ifYou want hands-on projects, graded exercises or current tooling, or you already know Python basics.

Pros

  • Gentle start that explains expressions, variables and data types for true beginners
  • Free companion book from the same author to read alongside the videos
  • Covers Excel, PDFs, email, web scraping and mouse automation, not just syntax
  • Short at about 9.5 hours, so it is realistic to finish

Cons

  • Only two quizzes and no coding exercises, so little chance to practice
  • Last updated February 2023, and some reviewers call it outdated
  • Some students found it rushed, with the latter part less clear than the start
The course is well paced and very informative. I'm enjoying learning Python following along and doing all the exercises with Al Sweigart.
Chris Blore, a student

Suits true beginners; only basic computer skills are needed. Experienced Python users can skip the first half.

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What you will learn

  • Automate tasks on their computer by writing simple Python programs.
  • Write programs that can do text pattern recognition with "regular expressions".
  • Programmatically generate and update Excel spreadsheets.
  • Parse PDFs and Word documents.
  • Crawl web sites and pull information from online sources.
  • Write programs that send out email notifications.
  • Use Python's debugging tools to quickly figure out bugs in your code.
  • Programmatically control the mouse and keyboard to click and type for you.

Course content

16 sections · 51 lectures · 9.5 hours of video 2 quizzes

  1. 1Python Basics 3 free previews3 lectures · 2 quizzes · 27 min
  2. 2Flow Control 4 free previews4 lectures · 35 min
  3. 3Functions 3 free previews3 lectures · 31 min
  4. 4Handling Errors with try/except 1 free preview1 lecture · 7 min
  5. 5Writing a Complete Program: Guess the Number 1 free preview1 lecture · 12 min
  6. 6Lists 4 free previews4 lectures · 49 min
  7. 7Dictionaries 2 free previews2 lectures · 30 min
  8. 8More About Strings 3 free previews3 lectures · 30 min
  9. 9Running Programs from the Command Line 1 free preview1 lecture · 14 min
  10. 10Regular Expressions 7 free previews7 lectures · 1.7 hours

Who it is for

The instructor says it suits

  • Office workers, students, small/home business workers, and administrators would want to improve their productivity.
  • Aspiring software engineers who want to add skills to their programming toolbelt.
  • Computer users who have heard the "learn to code" message, but want practical reasons to learn programming.
  • Experienced Python software engineers can skip the first half of the course, but may find the later parts that cover various third-party modules helpful.
  • While this course doesn't cover specific devops tools, this course would be useful for QA, devops, and admins who want to learn scripting in Python.

What you need before you start

  • No programming experience is required.
  • Downloading and installing Python is covered at the start of the course.
  • Basic computer skills: surfing websites, running programs, saving and opening documents, etc.

How it compares

Against the other 388 rated Udemy courses in Python on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.7 out of 5higher than 88% of them
  • Reviews119,567#3 of 389 by number of reviews
  • Length9.5 hoursshorter than 51% of them
  • Last updatedFebruary 2023earlier than 54% of them

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Course Description

If you're an office worker, student, administrator, or just want to become more productive with your computer, programming will allow you write code that can automate tedious tasks. This course follows the popular (and free!) book, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python was written for people who want to get up to speed writing small programs that do practical tasks as soon as possible. You don't need to know sorting algorithms or object-oriented programming, so this course skips all the computer science and concentrates on writing code that gets stuff done.

This course is for complete beginners and covers the popular Python programming language. You'll learn basic concepts as well as:

  • Web scraping
  • Parsing PDFs and Excel spreadsheets
  • Automating the keyboard and mouse
  • Sending emails and texts
  • And several other practical topics

By the end of this course, you'll be able to write code that not only dramatically increases your productivity, but also be able to list this fun and creative skill on your resume.

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Instructor Details

Al Sweigart

Al Sweigart is a software developer and author. He has written eight programming books, spoken at Python conferences, and has taught both kids and adults how to program. Python is his favorite programming language, and he is the developer of several open source modules for it. He is driven to make programming knowledge available to all, and his books freely available under a Creative Commons license.

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Reviews

4.7

119,567 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By Colton Pinckard on 5/9/2026

It is amazing and very helpful than trying to teach this myself. I got a little in over my head with trying to get ai tools I need a baseline of fundamentals with absolutely no ai involved. This tool is absolutely what I need to get started and not become yet another boring vibe coder.

By Mark Hajewskyj on 4/25/2026

The intro is gentle, clear and well structured for people who've never coded before (describing what an expression is, what types of data values there are, how operators impact the values and how variables are named containers for values (which themselves can be used within an expression to manipulate their own values).

By Chris Blore on 4/16/2026

The course is well paced and very informative. I'm enjoying learning Python following along and doing all the exercises with Al Sweigart. I'm learning much more efficiently than I would by just reading the book and doing the exercises.

By Michael Hyatt on 4/6/2026

This is a good course to take to understand how python works and how you can add it to your workflow. Excellent explanations and use cases. Would have been perfect is it had some small projects to do.

By Данил Исанов on 4/5/2026

I got a lot of interesting information about how to use Python in everyday life. Cons: the course is a bit outdated and it does not provide independent practice on similar tasks.

By Fernando Natalio Raimondi on 4/3/2026

It´s an excellent introduction to the world of both programming and automate, I’m pursuing an Associate Degree in Data Science, and this course, tough it`s "old", gives more information, more useful information,than my university, thanks.

By Ina Krakowian on 3/31/2026

This was THE course I needed to get started. It helped me understand the basics of Python and programming. It was very helpful, the concepts were well explained, and it inspired me to write my own snippets of code as I was going through the lectures. The concepts I learned and practiced as part of this course made it easier for me to grasp more complex programming concepts when I started looking into programming AI-powered apps, learning LangChain and PyTorch and slowly maneuvering into data science. Thanks so much, Al.

By Benjamin Kopp on 2/12/2026

This course is the perfect match for my learning style. There is not a lot of back ground or 'fluff' in each module. Just enough explanation to explain the basics of the topic and enough examples to explain the nuances. I have a particular project in mind as I am going through the sections. I am taking away the code that I will be using in my project. I bought this course quite some time ago and am really glad I did as it is the perfect fit for my programming needs now.

By A. Jaya Brigit Roshni on 2/4/2026

The topics which covered so far is very good. Easy to learn. Only one request, please give program exercise to practice under each section for more understanding, it will give practical experience rather than listening the concepts alone...Thank you

By Anthony Positano on 2/1/2026

Great intro to Python, already used a lot of what I learned in this course to automate small tasks for my job, and build small personal projects to make my life easier. I will be taking the advanced course soon to further my Python skills. Thank you Al!

By Steven Vasquez on 12/27/2020

I am halfway through and still going. There were a couple of moments when the instructor's directions were unclear but the good news is that the Q&A board has hundreds of helpful comments that got me through those hiccups. Course seems to be focused on explaining the basics just enough to get you to where you can finally start automating stuff. So far I have only learned basics, which makes sense, but nothing that I have learned so far will help me in my job. I will update this review again once I can start seeing the results of these studies.

By Brian Cash on 12/27/2020

The course was very interesting, with lots of examples. It did progress quite fast on certain elements but generally, it was pretty well paced.

Showing 12 of 322 reviews

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Overall Score : 94 / 100