Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere: Techniques to fuel business productivity and intelligent automation using RPA

This is a great book if you are getting started with Automation Anywhere.It provides a step by step instructions to create your initial RPA automation with Pdfs, emails, word documents etc. It is a manual Automation Anywhere should have come with.

Review of book "Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere", published by Packt Publishing in 2020.In general, the "Automation Anywhere" framework uses what are essentially pre-packaged code widgets which are grouped in assemblages called "bots". An author selects and positions desired widgets in a sequence, modifying portions of them as necessary, and saves them. Once saved, these bots can be rerun or modified as necessary to tweak their behavior. This book serves as an introduction to the framework and its capabilities.Chapters 1-4 deal with general background, overview, and installation.Fairly quick read, but important especially if you have no familiarity with the material. An important note: Creating these bots starts with the design process. In this tool, that translates to entering comments (defining tasks) into the bot code FIRST and then creating code to accomplish the task.In Chapter 5, the "First Bot" is built. Technically it's the second bot - the first being a Hello World type bot in Chapter 4 - but let's not quibble. Building this bot exercises some foundational functionality like file input / output, calculations, and looping. The steps provided are very exact and work perfectly, though it's important to keep an eye on details. (On at least one occasion, an edit appeared to have an unexpected side effect. This also could have been a miss on my part.)The previous bot creation process is expanded in Chapter 6, which walks the user through exercises designed to use variables in the available data types: String, Number, Boolean etc. Some of these types are roughly analogous to those in various programming languages and some are essentially specific to this framework.Chapter 7 provides a first look at interacting with a "live" application, capturing web output and simulating keystroke input. Chapters 8 and 9 introduce string manipulation, lists and more advanced program flow, while Chapter 10 returns to file processing in a more intriguing topic - XML parsing and updating.At this point, we are firmly into more advanced areas, and the subsequent chapters 11-15 deal with use cases similar to "real world" app usage and interaction: working with artifacts from Microsoft applications Word and Excel, email handling, PDF format, and rudimentary database access.The balance of the book deals with debugging and features for more complicated program flow, such as sub-tasks, usage of additional bots within a single project design, and leveraging scripts from external tools such as Python or Visual Basic.Overall, the book style is sufficient though a bit plain and formulaic - the various exercises read much like tech support work flow documentation. That makes them specific and clear, but repetitive. A good selection of the various code widgets are exercised but the reader will note that MANY more are not - there simply are too many to explore in any detail (dozens of basic types each with multiple options). Also, there is no discussion about using outputs from these bots in concert with other test or reporting frameworks, which some organizations might require.However, insofar as granting users some initial exposure and familiarity, this book accomplishes that goal successfully.*Disclaimer: Review of a complimentary copy of the book