The Ultimate Web Scraping With Python Bootcamp 2023

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 to parse some specific information of interest.

Scraping is a programming skill that offers immediate feedback and can be used to automate various 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 boot camp 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 modern web’s key application layer communication protocol. Next, we’ll explore HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the first principles to better understand how websites 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 needed data. Our goal in the first part of the course is to build a solid foundation in web scraping and Python and put those skills to practice by building functional web scrapers from scratch. Selected topics include:

• a detailed overview of 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 beautiful soup 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 and another scraping agent that extracts the 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 select lax 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 Scrappy. This will give us an excellent, time-tested framework for building more complex and robust web scrapers. We’ll learn how to set up Scrappy within a virtual environment and create spiders and pipelines to extract data from websites in various formats. Having learned how to use Scraps, we’ll then explore how to integrate it with Playwright so that we tackle the challenge of scraping dynamic websites from right within Scrappy. We’ll conclude this section by building a scraping agent that executes custom JavaScript code before returning the resulting HTML to Scrappy. Some topics from this section:

• learning how to set up Scrappy and explore its command line interface (“the Scrapy tool“)
• dynamically explore response objects using scrappy shell
• understand and define item schemas and load data using item loaders and input/output processors
• integrate Playwright into Scrappy to tackle dynamically rendered JavaScript sites
• write PageMethods to specify highly specific instructions to the headless browser from right within Scrappy
• define custom pipelines for saving into SQL databases and highly customized output formats

In this boot camp, I will take you step-by-step through engaging video lectures and teach you everything you need to know to start with Python web scraping.

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!