pypackt 1.0.1

Tool to claim your daily free eBooks at www.packtpub.com with ease.

WARNING: Due to introduction of reCAPTCHA at https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning this project is no longer supported.

pypackt is a command line tool to easily claim daily free ebooks from www.packtpub.com into your packtpub account - my personal collection consists of over 350 books and still grows! :)

Table of Contents

1. Requirements

2. Installation

3. Usage

4. Contributing

5. Support

6. License

7. Troubleshooting

8. Acknowledgements

Requirements

pypackt works on Linux and Windows (tested on Linux Mint 18.1 and Windows 7) and is both Python 2 and Python 3 compatible (tested on python2.7 and python3.5+).

Dependencies:

• Scrapy - to interact with packtpub.com (login and ebook claim)

• requests - for URLs manipulation

• python-crontab - to add job to user’s crontab

Installation

pypackt can be easily installed using pip:

pip install -U pypackt

Usage

Basic usage

To run pypackt simply type pypackt in your terminal:

~$ pypackt

If you are running pypackt for the very first time you will be asked to provide your login details to www.packtpub.com:

~$ pypackt
Login data for packtpub.com is not set - please set it now:
Set Packtpub login details
Login: [e-mail]
Password:

(**NOTE*: Your login details are used ONLY to login into www.packtpub.com and are stored in user.ini file in package installation directory)*

If you have a working Internet connection and provided correct login details, after a moment you should see a title of the claimed ebook, for example:

Learning Robotics Using Python

Available commands

To see list of available commands just type pypackt -h:

usage: pypackt [-h] [-c | -l | -ls | -cr | -s]

Tool to claim your daily free eBooks at www.packtpub.com with ease.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  -c, --configure  Configure login and password to www.packtpub.com.
  -l, --last       Show last claimed book.
  -ls, --list      List all books claimed with pypackt.
  -cr, --cron      Add job to user's crontab to claim free ebooks daily.
  -s, --show       Show login settings.

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome - just:

1. Fork the project.

2. Commit your changes on a feature branch.

3. Push them.

4. Submit a pull request.

5. Have your changes merged :)

Support

If you need assistance, want to report a bug or request a feature, please raise an issue here or contact me directly at [e-mail].

Please attach pypackt.log file located in package installation directory if your request is bug related.

License

pypackt is released under the terms of the MIT License. Please refer to the LICENSE.txt file for more details.

Troubleshooting

On Windows you can encounter some problems during the installation process, which are - luckily - quite easy to solve:

Problem:

error: Microsoft Visual C++ 9.0 is required. Get it from http://aka.ms/vcpython27

Solution:

Open URL mentioned in the error message and install Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7.

Problem:

Unhandled error in Deferred:

Solution:

It’s a problem related to win32api. To solve it just install:

pip install -U pypiwin32

Problem:

error: Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required. Get it with "Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools":
http://landinghub.visualstudio.com/visual-cpp-build-tools

Solution:

Again - follow URL from error message, download and install Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools.

Acknowledgements

Great thanks to Packtpub.com for sharing free ebooks every day!