7. Mixed Bag of Tricks: Auxiliary Tools

At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged.

Charles Babbage

The more tools you have at your disposal, the better equipped you’ll be to adapt to constantly changing production needs. In this guided tour of my favorite auxiliary tools, I’ll explain what each tool does best and point out some of the most common problems they can be deployed to solve.

The three categories of tools covered here—multipurpose automation tools, data-cleaning tools, and triggering tools—generally play a supporting role to the other tools covered in this book (though there’s some overlap in capabilities). Multipurpose automation tools, as their name implies, cover ...

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