What's the big fuss over IT automation? Well, more than anything, the excitement is about the sorts of things that you don't have to do when automation is on your side. Things like not having to either copy and paste configuration changes to dozens (maybe hundreds) of different systems or repeat the same click, click, click, click, click-through-the-UI marathon over, and over, and over...every single time there's a need to make a bulk change 😡. To automate these sorts of workflows, we need to learn to write some form of automation-specific code. To make that possible, we must first learn to read and write the data structures that our code sends to and receives from the systems we automate.
This guide will walk you through some hands-on exercises that help teach and also give you a place to practice using various data encoding formats with Python. You'll get the most from these exercises if you have at least a little bit of exposure to Python fundamentals, although we put the step-by-step directions together in a way that welcomes all experience levels.
Navigate to https://wwt.github.io/devasc-data-formats and follow the guided walkthrough instructions.