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.
Michael Heydt is an independent consultant and specializes in social, mobile, analytics, and cloud technologies. He focuses on helping his clients create-cloud native, 12-factor applications. He has been a software developer and trainer for over thirty years, and is a polyglot programmer and multi-cloud/platform specialist. He has created scraping solutions for several media compliance companies, collecting data, and is happy to perform audits for advertising compliance. You can find more information about him on linked in at @michaelheydt
