Learn how to develop web scrapers with this detailed and practical course. Go from beginner to expert, all in one place.
Welcome to the “Web Scraping for Beginners” course, a comprehensive, hands-on, long-term guide that will take you from an absolute beginner to an experienced web scraper developer. If you need a quick start, we recommend trying this tutorial.
This course is created using Web-scrub, a web scraping and automation platform, but we will only use open-source technologies throughout all academy lessons. This means that the skills you acquire can be applied to any web scraping project, and you will be able to run your scrapers on any computer. No Web-scrub account is required.
If you want to learn about the Web-scrub platform and how it can help you build, run, and scale your web scraping and automation projects, check out the Web-scrub platform course. In it, we’ll introduce you to platform features such as serverless infrastructure, proxies, API, task scheduling, webhooks, and much more.
There are many tools and no-code software that allow you to extract data from websites, but why learn web scraper development? Despite marketing claims, such tools will never be as flexible, powerful, or optimized as a custom-built scraper.
Any software can only do what it was programmed to do. If you build your own scraper, it can do whatever you need. You can always quickly modify it to do more, less, or the same thing faster or cheaper. The possibilities are endless once you understand how web scraping works.
Scraper development is a fun and challenging way to learn web development, internet technologies, and how the web operates. You will reverse-engineer websites to understand how they work internally, what technologies they use, and how they communicate with their servers. You’ll also master your chosen programming language and core programming concepts. Once you truly understand web scraping, learning other technologies like React or Next.js will be a breeze.
We aimed to create a complete guide to web scraping — a course that a beginner could use to create their first scraper, as well as a resource that professionals could continually refer to for advanced and niche web scraping techniques and technologies. All lessons include code examples and code-along exercises so that you can immediately put your web scraping skills into practice.
Here’s what you’ll learn in the Web Scraping for Beginners course:
- The basics of data extraction
- The basics of web crawling
- Best practices for scraping.
You don’t need to be a developer or software engineer to complete this course, but basic programming knowledge is recommended. Don’t worry, though — we explain everything in detail and provide external resources to help you improve your web scraping and web development skills. If you’re new to programming, pay close attention to the instructions and examples. Even small things like using [] instead of () can make a big difference.
If you don’t yet have basic programming knowledge and want to be well-prepared for this course, we recommend learning the basics of Python and CSS Selectors.
As you move on to the more advanced sections, the code will become more challenging but will remain manageable for someone with an intermediate programming skill level.
Ideally, you should have at least a moderate understanding of the following concepts:
- Python: It is recommended to have a basic understanding of Python before starting this course. If you are not yet comfortable with asynchronous programming (with async...await), loops, modularity, or working with external packages, we recommend studying the following resources before returning to continue this section: async...await (YouTube), Python loops, Modularity in Python.
- General Web Development: Throughout the lessons, we’ll use certain technologies and terms related to the web without explaining them, as they will be assumed knowledge (unless we are showing something out of the ordinary) (HTML, HTTP protocol, Browser DevTools, BeautifulSoup or lxml).
We will use the BeautifulSoup package a lot to parse data from HTML. This package provides a convenient API for traversing downloaded HTML in Python.
The course begins with a bit of theory and moves on to practical examples of extracting data from popular websites using your browser’s console. Let’s get started!
If you already have experience with HTML, CSS, and browser DevTools, feel free to skip ahead to the Basics of Crawling section.