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

What happens after scraping?

Web scraping is a method of collecting and supplying quality data, and applying various techniques that depend on data. Any faculty or domain that involves data provides the opportunity to learn and grow as data collected from scraping is used for many other tasks such as analysis, reporting, dataset creation, and mining. Web-scraping-related techniques have always been dynamic and challenging, alongside the growth of web-based technologies.

Systems based on data, returning raw data, processed data, and visualization plots, in the form of images and videos, are growing by involving global audiences in multiple forms. Information technology (IT)-driven systems are core applications used in all industries, and Python programming has played a major role in the development and processing of data-related systems.

Earlier chapters of this book presented various steps that consolidated a few main concepts and actions, as listed here:

  • Demand for data...