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

Working with the Secure Web

So far, we have learned about the web, web content, reverse-engineering techniques, data-finding techniques, a few Python libraries, and a framework that we can employ to access and scrape the desired web content.

Plenty of security-related concerns exist on web platforms today, along with measures to ensure security. Lots of web applications, extensions, and even web-based service providers exist to protect us and our web-based systems against unauthenticated usage and unauthorized access.

The growing use of internet applications and e-commerce activity demands a secure web (or web-based security-enabled features) as a high priority to deal with actions that are harmful or even illegal. We often receive irrelevant emails or spam, containing information that we did not ask for.

It’s quite challenging from a web scraping perspective to deal with such issues, but the concept of ethical hacking makes it more viable, even from an application...