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 ML

Data collection, analysis, and the mining of data to extract information are major agendas of many data-related systems. Processing, analyzing, and executing mining-related functions requires processing time, evaluation, and interpretation to reach the desired state. Using ML, systems can be trained on relevant or sample data and ML can be further used to evaluate and interpret other data or datasets for the final output.

ML-based processing is implemented similarly to and can be compared to data mining and predictive modeling, for example, classifying emails in an inbox as spam and not spam. Spam detection is a kind of decision-making to classify emails according to their content. A system or spam-detecting algorithm is trained on inputs or datasets and can distinguish emails as spam or not.

ML predictions and decision-making models are dependent on data. ML models can be built on top of, and also use, several algorithms, which allows the system to provide...