Untangle your web scraping complexities and access web data with ease using Python scripts
Key Features
- Hands-on recipes for advancing your web scraping skills to expert level
- One-stop solution guide to address complex and challenging web scraping tasks using Python
- Understand web page structures and collect data from a website with ease
Book Description
Python Web Scraping Cookbook is a solution-focused book that will teach you techniques to develop high-performance scrapers and deal with crawlers, sitemaps, forms automation, Ajax-based sites, caches, and more.
You'll explore a number of real-world scenarios where every part of the development/product life cycle will be fully covered. You will not only develop the skills needed to design and develop reliable performance data flows, but also deploy your codebase to AWS. If you are involved in software engineering, product development, or data mining (or are interested in building data-driven products), you will find this book useful as each recipe has a clear purpose and objective. Right from extracting data from the websites to writing a sophisticated web crawler, the book's independent recipes will be a godsend. This book covers Python libraries, requests, and BeautifulSoup. You will learn about crawling, web spidering, working with Ajax websites, paginated items, and more. You will also learn to tackle problems such as 403 errors, working with proxy, scraping images, and LXML.
By the end of this book, you will be able to scrape websites more efficiently and able to
deploy and operate your scraper in the cloud.
What you will learn
- Use a variety of tools to scrape any website and data, including BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium and many more
- Master expression languages, such as XPath and CSS, and regular expressions to extract web data
- Deal with scraping traps such as hidden form fields, throttling, pagination, and different status codes
- Build robust scraping pipelines with SQS and RabbitMQ
- Scrape assets like image media and learn what to do when Scraper fails to run
- Explore ETL techniques of building a customized crawler, parser, and convert structured and unstructured data from websites
- Deploy and run your scraper as a service in AWS Elastic Container Service
Who this book is for
This book is ideal for Python programmers, web administrators, security professionals, and anyone who wants to perform web analytics. Familiarity with Python and basic understanding of web scraping will be useful to make the best of this book.
Christoffer Noring is a software developer with more than 10 years of experience. He has successfully delivered software for different industries, ranging from telecom to aviation. Throughout his career, he has worked on everything from databases right through to frontends.
He is very passionate about community and sharing knowledge, which is why he frequently speaks on topics ranging from TDD, React, and NativeScript to Angular. He also writes books and blogs frequently. He holds the title of Google Developer Expert in web technologies and AngularJS/Angular. He is also a Telerik Developer Expert in the mobile framework, NativeScript.
Christoffer currently works for McKinsey as a fullstack developer. He is the author and maintainer of the book, RxJS Ultimate, which aims to be a free resource to help the community.
Pablo Deeleman is a former UI/UX designer who fell in love with JavaScript and CSS back in 1998, during the good old days of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3. The discovery of Node.js back in 2011 became a turning point in his career, from where he decided to embrace full-time JavaScript-driven development, carving out a career as a JavaScript full stack engineer with special focus on single-page application development. You can reach out to the author on Twitter @chris_noring.
With sound expertise in libraries and frameworks, such as Backbone.js, Knockout.js, Polymer, React, AngularJs, and Angular, Pablo Deeleman built his career in a wide range of companies encompassing internationally acclaimed tube sites, fintech start-ups, and award-winning gaming and gambling sites. He currently works as a senior frontend engineer and Angular specialist for Red Hat, the multinational company providing open source software products to the enterprise community.
Pablo has also authored Learning Angular 2 (Packt, 2016) and currently lives in sunny and bustling Barcelona, where he fulfills his other great passion: playing piano.
