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

Why Python (for web scraping)?

Python is a popular programming language that is used to code various types of applications, from simple scripts to software development, ML/AI algorithms, and CLI/GUI apps, and also to create web applications. Python’s simple Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) syntax is very readable, which allows developers to write code in not many lines and work on different platforms (which means Python is platform independent), which makes it the number-one choice among programming languages.

Python is a buzzword in today’s programming domain. Quite a lot of tools and web applications are produced and managed using Python, which is compatible with small and large apps and is supplied with adequate and up-to-date libraries by its global developer audience.

Figure 2.1 (taken from https://www.python.org) shows Success Stories and Use Python for… information for various types of applications:

Figure 2.1: Python success stories and usage

Figure 2.1: Python success...