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

In this chapter, we explored and learned about parsing and extracting data from the web using Beautiful Soup and Scrapy.

So far, in this book, we have identified many libraries and techniques that are effective and suitable for web scraping. Beautiful Soup equips developers with a handful of features to parse, traverse, and create a crawler. Scrapy provides the same features as Beautiful Soup and can be used for data extraction, but is more of a project-based framework that uses lots of libraries behind the scenes and enables you to focus only on your tasks. Because of Scrapy’s easy-to-implement and collaborative architecture, it’s quite popular among beginners, professionals, and even web-based service providers such as Zyte, ScrapeOps, and Apify.

In the next chapter, we will learn about and explore more scraping techniques and security-related issues.