Web Scraping In Python: Master The Fundamentals
What you'll learn
- Tackle new challenges by understand the underlying method/approach to take
- Scrape static webpages
- Be able to scrape websites that use Javascript
- Extract all sorts of data from websites
- Know what to look for and how to approach parsing a website
- Gather data from all over the internet
- Use recursion algorithms to search through website content
Requirements
- Basic Python knowledge
- A Python 3 Environment to Code in
Description
Web scraping is the art of picking out data from a website by looking at the HTML code and identifying patterns that can be used to identify your data. This data can then be gathered and later used for your own analysis.
In this course we will go over the basic of web scraping and crawling, learning all about how we can extract data from websites, and all of this is guided along by a work example.
In the course will start with the simpler aspect of scraping static websites. We'll do this using requests to get the website data and use BeautifulSoup to effortlessly parse it.
Once we have a hang of the fundamentals we'll then get into dynamic websites that use Javascript to render their content. In this section of the course we'll be using Selenium to render the pages for us which will provide us with the full page of information. We'll also learn to do commonly needed things like clicking on buttons (e.g. when a page has a pop-up), or sending text into a form - in case your scraper needs to perform searches or login somewhere.
At the end of the course you should be able to go off on your own, and pick out most common websites, and be able to extract all the relevant data you may need just through using Python code.
Who this course is for:
- Anyone interested in analyzing data
- Anyone who doesn't know how to start gathering data
- Anyone who wants to develop their ability to scrap data
- Anyone interested in starting with web scraping
- Anyone who is interested in expanding their Python knowledge
- Anyone who wants to gather a wide array of data to play with
Instructor
Hey there! My name is Max.
And I’m a data loving, Dungeons & Dragons playing, Python programming dude.
I’ve got a Bachelors in Physics and a Masters in Astrophysics.
For the past 5 years, I’ve been working in the field of data - starting as a Data Scientist then becoming and working as a Data Engineer.
I stumbled into the world of programming and data completely by accident — but the first time I coded a simple blackjack program in Python is the first time it really “clicked” for me.
They say you know you truly love an activity if you reach a state of “flow”, and that is what programming does for me. Everything fades away and all that exists is me, some good tunes, those little lines of white text, and the agitating company of a bug or two or five.
If I’m honest, these 3 decisions changed the path of my career (and probably my life) entirely:
1. Deciding to finally learn Python at university, after 2 failed attempts in high school
2. Tentatively venturing into the data world, which started with simply googling “what does a data scientist do”
3. Committing to a data engineer pivot by learning about big data tools and infrastructure design to build scalable systems and pipelines
I could talk endlessly about data infrastructure, big data pipelines and my relentless and eternally raging fire for Python.
Going into data gave me endless passion for my work & completely changed the trajectory of my life.
I can’t wait to help you find and do the same.