Web scraping allows you to extract large amounts of data for multiple purposes. However, many of you may struggle to find suitable tutorials to learn it properly.
In this article today, we will discuss the best language to learn for web scrapping and where you can find proper tutorials for this practice.
As our title suggests, Python is the most popular programming language to learn for web scrapping.
Now, we will discuss why this particular language is best for web scrapping and where you can learn it properly in detail right below. Also, we will explore some best practices to follow.
Why Learn Python For Web Scraping
Python can handle almost all crawling-related processes smoothly and is overall an all-rounder programming language. Thus, this language is better known as web scraper language.
Beautiful Soup is a python based framework that can make scraping very straightforward. This library helps you with an efficient and fast web scraping process. It allows you to use Pythonic idioms to search, navigate, and modify a parse tree.
Also, this framework is compatible with most popular Python parsers to experiment with different parsing methodologies.
With the help of the best frameworks for web apps, you can learn the web scraping basics and can also use the language for small-scale use.
Where To Learn Web Scraping With Python
There are numerous paid and free online courses available from where you can learn Python for web scraping. Here are our top picks for web scraping courses:
Web Scraping And API Fundamentals In Python 2024
This course is available on Udemy and is one of the best courses available. Here you can learn the following key things:
- Fundamentals of Web Scraping
- How to implement APIs into your applications
- Master working with Beautiful Soup
- Start using requests-HTML
- Create functioning scrapers
- Scrape JavaScript
- Familiarize yourself with HTML
- Get the hang of CSS Selectors
- Make HTTP requests
- Understand website cookies
- Explore scraping content locked behind a log-in system
This course is created by 365 Careers and is overall an excellent course for web scraping.
Exploring Web Scraping With Python
This course is available on Pluralsight. This course allows you to learn key skills in an action-oriented way.
Here are the things you expect to learn from this course:
- Installing Python Web Scraping libraries, BeautifulSoup, and Requests.
- Extracting URLs from web pages.
- Scraping text data from different web pages.
- Crawling and scraping data from multiple web pages.
- Handling navigation links and move-to-next pages.
- how to build a spider in about 20 lines of code with Scrapy
Clarke Bishop, one of the prominent content creators of Pluralsight, developed this course.
Learn Web Scraping With Beautiful Soup
This is another course from Udemy specifically designed to learn web scraping with the Beautiful Soup library.
However, you will need to first learn data analysis and Python 3, which you will also find on the same site.
The course duration for this course is 1 hour, and it has a 4.4 rating out of 5. From this course, you will learn:
- Parsing HTML and XML files for all sorts of information.
- Taking data that’s displayed on websites and putting it into Python utilizing the Beautiful Soup library
However, if you want to learn python web scraping from a reputed scraping software, check this detailed guide.
Best Practices To Follow When Learning Python For Web Scraping
If you are a beginner at learning Python and web scraping, you can easily feel overwhelmed.
However, if you really want to learn, you should not be afraid and need to be committed to learning. Here are some best practices you should follow:
Start Small
Processing large amounts of data at once can easily overwhelm you and discourage the learning process. So, you should start small when learning Python and web scraping.
Once you successfully gather data from small websites, shift to bigger ones. Remember to celebrate your small accomplishments to keep you interested in learning.
Be Consistent
Consistency is the key to success. Once you have taken a course, you should immediately put your learning into practice.
With multiple practices, you can put your skills to the test and become an expert in this process.
Know About Requirments
To properly scrap websites, you will need to learn about the requirements with your heart. Web scraping can be divided into two parts in general:
- HTTP requests to fetch data
- Parsing the HTML DOM to extract necessary data
Tools And Libraries
You will need to have the following tools and libraries to properly web scrapping with Python:
- Beautiful Soup
- Web scraping tool
- Requests
Bottom Line
Data allows you to see the very essence of a business. As the use of the internet increases, getting appropriate data can be quite helpful for your different endeavors. Web scraping makes getting this data easy for you.
Make sure to go to the right websites to learn the most efficient programming language and techniques for web scraping.
Also, celebrating your small accomplishments and being consistent in your practice will make you an expert web scraper sooner rather than later.
