Practical Web Scraping for Data Science

This book provides a comprehensive and modern guide to web scraping using Python as the programming language, without neglecting important details or best practices. It is written with a data science audience in mind and covers both scraping and the broader context of web technologies in which it operates to ensure a complete understanding. The authors advocate for web scraping as a powerful tool in the arsenal of any data scientist, as many data science projects begin with acquiring an appropriate dataset. After a brief overview of scraping and realistic use cases, the authors explore the core concepts of HTTP, HTML, and CSS to provide a solid foundation. In addition to a brief introduction to Python, they cover Selenium for JavaScript-heavy pages and web crawling in detail. The book concludes with a summary of best practices and a collection of examples that bring together everything you have learned.