Welcome to the Ultimate Web Scraping With Python Bootcamp, the only course you need to go from a complete beginner in python to a very competent web scraper.
Web scraping is the process of programmatically extracting data from the web. Scraping agents visit a web resource, extract content from it, and then process the resulting data in order to parse some specific information of interest.
Scraping is the kind of programming skill that offers immediate feedback, and can be used to automate a wide variety of data collection and processing tasks.
Over the next 17+ hours, we will methodically cover everything you need to know to write web scraping agents in python.
This bootcamp is organized in three parts of increasing difficulty designed to help you progressively build your skill.
Part I – Begin
We’ll start by understanding how the web works by taking a closer look at HTTP, the key application layer communication protocol of the modern web. Next, we’ll explore HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from first principles to get a deeper understanding of how website are built. Finally, we’ll learn how to use python to send HTTP requests and parse the resulting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to extract the data we need. Our goal in the first part of the course is to build a solid foundation in both web scraping and python, and put those skills to practice by building functional web scrapers from scratch. Selected topics include:
- a detailed overview the request-response cycle
- understanding user-agents, HTTP verbs, headers and statuses
- understanding why custom headers can often be used to bypass paywalls
- mastering the requests library to work with HTTP in python
- what stateless means and how cookies work
- exploring the role of proxies in modern web architectures
- mastering beautifulsoup for parsing and data extraction
Part II – Refine
In the second part of the course, we’ll build on the foundation we’ve already laid to explore more advanced topics in web scraping. We’ll learn how to scrape dynamic websites that use JavaScript to render their content, by setting up Microsoft Playwright as a headless browser to automate this process. We’ll also learn how to identify and emulate API calls to scrape data from websites that don’t have formally public APIs. Our projects in this section will include an image scraper that can download a set number of high-resolution images given some keyword, as well as another scraping agent that extracts price and content of discounted video games from a dynamically rendered website. Topics include:
- identifying and using hidden APIs and understanding the benefits they offer
- emulating headers, cookies, and body content with ease
- automatically generating python code from intercepted API requests using postman and httpie
- working with the highly performant selectolax parsing library
- mastering CSS selectors
- introducing Microsoft Playwright for headless browsing and dynamic rendering
Part III – Master
In the final part of the course, we’ll introduce scrapy. This will give us an excellent, time-tested framework for building more complex and robust web scrapers. We’ll learn how to set up scrapy within a virtual environment and how to create spiders and pipelines to extract data from websites in a variety of formats. Having learned how to use scrapy, we’ll then explore how to integrate it with Playwright so that we tackle the challenge of scraping dynamic websites from right within scrapy. We’ll conclude this section by building a scraping agent that executes custom JavaScript code before returning the resulting HTML to scrapy. Some topics from this section:
- learning how to set up scrapy and explore its command line interface (“the scrapy tool“)
- dynamically explore response objects using scrapy shell
- understand and define item schemas and load data using itemloaders and input/output processors
- integrate Playwright into scrapy to tackle dynamically rendered JavaScript sites
- write PageMethods to specify highly specific instructions to the headless browser from right within scrapy
- define custom pipelines for saving into SQL databases and highly customized output formats
In this bootcamp, I will take you step-by-step through engaging video lectures and teach you everything you need to know to get started with web scraping in python.
By the end of this course, you will have a complete toolset to conceptualize and implement scraping agents for any website you can imagine.
See you inside!
