Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

By : Anish Chapagain
Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python - Second Edition

By: Anish Chapagain

Overview of this book

Web scraping is a powerful tool for extracting data from the web, but it can be daunting for those without a technical background. Designed for novices, this book will help you grasp the fundamentals of web scraping and Python programming, even if you have no prior experience. Adopting a practical, hands-on approach, this updated edition of Hands-On Web Scraping with Python uses real-world examples and exercises to explain key concepts. Starting with an introduction to web scraping fundamentals and Python programming, you’ll cover a range of scraping techniques, including requests, lxml, pyquery, Scrapy, and Beautiful Soup. You’ll also get to grips with advanced topics such as secure web handling, web APIs, Selenium for web scraping, PDF extraction, regex, data analysis, EDA reports, visualization, and machine learning. This book emphasizes the importance of learning by doing. Each chapter integrates examples that demonstrate practical techniques and related skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the skills to extract data from websites, a solid understanding of web scraping and Python programming, and the confidence to use these skills in your projects for analysis, visualization, and information discovery.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1:Python and Web Scraping
4
Part 2:Beginning Web Scraping
8
Part 3:Advanced Scraping Concepts
13
Part 4:Advanced Data-Related Concepts
16
Part 5:Conclusion

Introduction to data mining

The term “mining” normally means the extraction or the process of extracting something. Data mining is the process of extracting data or discovering information from data. Data mining is a growing and ever-developing concept that discovers hidden, unexpected, and other various forms of information from datasets or databases, which helps in KD and decision-making.

In terms of data, mining is used as a form of analysis to discover patterns, hidden facts, and more. When knowledge is discovered using mining techniques, this is known as knowledge discovery in databases (KDD or knowledge discovery and data mining). There are plenty of terms used to describe data mining, such as KDD, information harvesting, pattern discovery from databases, and many more; although the final results are the same, these terms differ in the steps and processing architecture.

Important note

KDD is an almost cyclical process that has data mining as one of its...