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

Summary

Python programming makes a huge contribution in AI- and ML-related domains. In this chapter, we have had only a glimpse of that. Quality data plays a very important role in ML. Whether collecting data via web scraping and storing it or providing scraped data on the fly to an ML model, prepared data is in demand. The better the quality of the data – and the more precise the data is – that we provide to ML algorithms, and for plotting charts, the more accurate results, visualizations, and descriptive plots we can expect.

We have now learned about ML concepts and various aspects of ML by exploring them. We have also learned how to implement ML models and collect the results, if required, from various processes. To summarize, we now have an overview of how to use scikit-learn and conduct sentiment analysis. ML is data-driven and quality data is a basic requirement for ML models to provide accuracy.

In the next chapter, we will learn about a few further steps...