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

Exploring secure web content

Today’s web and internet technologies are quite vulnerable in terms of web security (content, authorization, illegal access, and so on). We want the web to be safe and the content that we browse, search, or view to be genuine, not violating any legal or ethical standards or affecting people’s human rights.

The web must be accessible and available to everyone who seeks information, effectively and by following ethical practices. We often encounter web content that is not exactly what we were looking for, or hear of web content that has been tampered with or hacked into or that private and sensitive information has been leaked illegally, and so on. Although a lot of these cases are beyond our control, we can reduce vulnerabilities and make the web a much safer place to be.

In many new technologies, security-related concerns have been identified and solutions have been implemented. There are even applications and organizations concerned...