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

Python Programming for Data and Web

In Chapter 1, you got an idea of what web scraping is, what core technologies exist, and how and where you can plan to find the resources or data you’re looking for.

Web scraping requires tools and techniques to be implemented and deployed using scripts or programs. We have chosen Python (https://www.python.org/) for this purpose, as it is very easy to learn and has a huge set of libraries for communicating with the World Wide Web (WWW), data-related processes, and finally, web scraping. In internet search results, we often find Python mentioned in conjunction with data science and Machine Learning (ML). This is because of the wide use of Python in such projects.

In this chapter, we will explore the key benefits of Python and communicate with web resources using Python libraries. This chapter will also provide a detailed overview of installing and using Python libraries such as requests and urllib.

In particular, we will learn about...