Author : Seppe vanden Broucke
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 14,65 MB
Release : 2017-11-30
Category :
ISBN : 9781979343787
Book Description
Get Started with Web Scraping using Python! Congratulations! By picking up this book, you've set the first steps into the exciting world of web scraping. For those who are not familiar with programming or the deeper workings of the web, web scraping often looks like a black art: the ability to write a program that sets off on its own to explore the Internet and collect data is seen as a magical and exciting ability to possess. In this book, we set out to provide a concise and modern guide to web scraping, using Python as our programming language, without glossing over important details or best practices. In addition, this book is written with a data science audience in mind. We're data scientists ourselves, and have very often found web scraping to be a powerful tool to have in your arsenal, as many data science projects start with the first step of obtaining an appropriate data set, so why not utilize the treasure trove of information the web provides. As such, we've strived to offer a guide that: Is concise and to the point, whilst also being thorough Is geared towards data scientists: we'll show you how web scraping fits into the data science workflow Takes a "code first" approach to get you up to speed quickly without too much boilerplate text Is modern by using well-established best practices and Python packages only Shows how to handle the web of today, including JavaScript, cookies, and common web scraping mitigation techniques Includes a thorough managerial and legal discussion regarding web scraping Provides lots of pointers for further reading and learning Includes many larger, fully worked out examples Chapter Overview Nine chapters are included in this book. In Chapter 1, we provide a brief overview on web scraping and real-life use cases and make sure your Python environment is set up correctly. In Chapter 2, you'll learn the basics regarding HTTP, the core piece of technology behind the web, and the requests Python library. In Chapter 3, we start working with HTML and CSS sites, using the Beautiful Soup library. Chapter 4 returns to HTTP, exploring it more detail. Chapter 5 introduces the Selenium library, which you'll use to scrape JavaScript-heavy websites. Chapter 6 explains web crawling in detail. In Chapter 7, an in-depth discussion regarding managerial and legal concerns is provided. Chapter 8 recaps best practices and provides pointers to other tools. Chapter 9 includes fourteen, fully worked out web scraping examples bringing everything you've learned together, and illustrates various interesting data science oriented use cases.