Web Scraping with Python: Collecting Data from the Modern Web

This book is excellent. I love the focus on Python 3 and all the techniques presented. I felt like it was Christmas day just reading the Table of Contents. THIS BOOK IS PACKED FULL OF INFORMATION. It is a joy to read and always has answers when I am looking. I have found it useful in my scraping at work and at home on multiple occasions. Easy read and a joy to have read. Thank you Ryan for this book!

After learning the basics of Python I really struggled to dig into a project. Programming, just like a foreign language, leaves your memory quickly if you don't use it. I had tried web scraping with several video tutorials, but couldn't work through the tutorials to the point of understanding how to build one myself. Then...I got Ryan Mitchell's book. This book sets you up with not only the basics, but also more advanced techniques that you'll need to really build out your scraper. Ryan touches on other subjects such as using a database, working around data hidden in Javascript, cleaning up data, using NLPT, and more. You'll get a solid foundation to launch into your own Web Scraping project, and learn just enough about additional topics (like MySql) to integrate them into your scraper. I really appreciate how Ryan made this approachable for both a Python beginner, and for an intermediate user.

90% of the time this book has exactly what I needed to solve a real world problem. 10% of the time, it went over my head and I spent hours on YouTube shoring up the material I couldn't gain from the book. In example, the section on storing data in MySQL via PyMySQL was a bit too short, unclear for me to get a real handle on how to automate db queries with Python.Nonetheless, as an entry level python programmer, I found the book mostly readily accessible. If you're an experienced coder (python or otherwise) this book is a great investment in your data acquisition skills.I'll end on a positive note - my boss likes weather updates for our offices in four different cities (we do logistics.) He wants this report at 6:15am daily. I was able to write a .py script that scrapes the webpage, compiles results into a string, logs into my email account and sends the report to him daily, on time. Now I never have to worry about this early morning task again!If you need to automate the retrieval, processing and delivery of online information, this book is for you!

This is mostly a beginners' manual, so don't expect extremely complicated programs or tips. However, if you are new to web scraping, this is a great introductory book to the tools available in Python and their uses. In my case, I had learned most of what was in the book using trial and error (and lots of time going through Stack Exchange questions!). If I had had this book before, I would have saved a lot of time learning the basics.

Good book with some good tips. Fairly basic but does touch on some advanced scraping techniques briefly. Author does a good job and I would absolutely recommend this to others looking to learn more about extracting info from web pages.

I really wanted to like this book but for 200 pages it goes over way too much basic information. For example, the author introduces the Python set data structure, but describes in it like reader is totally unfamiliar with sets. Later GET/POST is discussed also as if the reader has never heard of it. There are tons of topics where the description sounds as if the reader has never programmed at all. At one point file extensions were introduced... it was these elementary descriptions which were incredibly annoying to me.Even the appendix was poorly constructed. There was an entire paragraph about how Python does not use semi-colons. Then there were reminders that languages such as Java and C++ need semi-colons, in case you switch back... was this written for a first time programmer? The last appendix was 10 pages about legal ramifications of scraping; a lot of rambling here and wasted space.Speaking of wasted space, sometimes the author shows an example which outputs junk data for half a page. There was no need for these parts to be in print.On the content and examples themselves you would be better served just by going to the documentation for BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and the other libraries introduced. Another negative was the lack of on how to crawl Javascript; there was mention but just to say your code may break if there is too much Javascript. There were a few interesting examples with Wikipedia and how to crawl it, but there needed to be much more.The chapters never seemed to link together for me. A lot of chapters cover something totally random from the last, and at the end I felt like I had a bunch of random techniques from different libraries. I can at least say I got a better idea of how to design a web crawler though.This book is incredibly short if you factor in the filler and elementary info. The author should have spent a lot more time giving useful examples rather than describing why Python sets are different from lists.

During last year, my point of view to acceptability of Python for real life projects has changed very seriously. Earlier, I thought, that Python can be useful as a simple automation tool, but the language is powerful, flexible and gave me sense of control under my code. When I finished the book, I found that 40 pages of remarks, link and ideas have been written by me. It is the great result – the book inspired me to dig deeper the issues related to machine learning, Selenium/webdrivers and text processing. Only one topic is not disclosed - the CAPTCHAs recognition. It is still unclear how to do that in the reality.Anyway, I like to say THANKS to Ryan Mitchell – your book is awesome!

Author has an excellent knowledge on subject. Every chapter is well presented.

was reading through this - real insightful

Al fín un libro de scraping práctico... Gracias a sus ejemplos, nada más empezar la lectura, he podido obtener algunos resultados útiles. Eso sí, como todo libro impreso, ya tiene un pequeño desfase, y algunas librerías se quejan, como BeautifulSoup. Es cuestión de adaptarlos un poco y seguir adelante.No profundiza excesivamente en cómo procesar nodos hijos y demás, lo cual sería deseable. Da una base para cada cosa y a partir de ahí hay que espabilarse. Sin embargo, es una satisfacción comprobar que Python puede hacer las cosas mucho mejor que un simple script Shell. Tengo ganas de ver hasta dónde se puede llegar...Eso sí, si no has programado nunca en Python, no ayuda mucho, se supone que hay que conocer el lenguaje.

Excellente introduction au web scrapping à l'aide de python.Les outils essentiels sont tous explorés en surface (beautifulsoup, mySQL, selenium, pil, ...) mais des liens très utiles sont cités afin de pouvoir aller plus loin.Les exemples sont clairs, bien documentés, en python 3.x mais très aisément adaptables en 2.7.Donc un ouvrage à conseiller +++ a toutes personne cherchant une introduction solide au sujet.

Ottimo per chi ha già un' infarinatura di tecniche di scraping e linguaggio Python. Non credo ne esista una edizione scritta in italiano ma lo consiglio vivamente.