Building Slack Bots

Key Features

• This is the first developer's guide to programming for Slack
• It covers everything you need to create chat bots for Slack's conversational UI
• It's full of realistic examples, usable code, and lucid explanations on everything you need to know

Book Description

Slack promises that its users will "be less busy." Slack bots interact with users in Slack chatrooms, providing useful immediate information, and automating work. This book gives you everything you need to build powerful and useful Slack bots.

You'll see how to hook into the Slack API to create software that can read and post to chatrooms, respond to commands and hints given in natural conversational language, and build fun and useful bots for your own place of work, both as a front end to your own service and to distribute and share as apps. You can even sell your bots and build a business as a Slack bot developer.

Throughout the book, you'll build useful and fun example applications that you can modify for your own situations. These range from simple, fun applications to liven up discussions to useful, data-driven apps to help you make decisions quickly and manage work.

What you will learn

• Receive and send messages sent in Slack
• Respond to user commands
• Process natural language
• Perform useful tasks on commands such as fetching data from external sources
• Use webhooks and slash commands
• Create a Google Classroom and add customized information for each individual class

About the Author

Paul Asjes started programming on his TI-83 calculator in high school and has been hooked ever since.

Specializing in JavaScript, he is always interested in staying up to date with the latest developments in the field. Currently, he is building universal full-stack apps with technologies such as React, Webpack, and Node when he's not spending far too much time on Slack.

Since his IRC days, he has been interested in chat bots and how they can be used. He has written several Slack bots to date, ranging from bots that facilitate playing games to bots that retrieve important business metrics.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with Slack
2. Your First Bot
3. Adding Complexity
4. Using Data
5. Understanding and Responding to Natural Language
6. Webhooks and Slash Commands
7. Publishing Your App