Today let’s talk about the top 3 courses that you can take to become a stronger data scientist. Stay tuned to the end; a bonus is there already.
Now, there are so many web scraping courses on Udemy; so many courses teaching how to scrape data from the web using Python.
But.
I’m focusing here on the resources that will make you excel in the web scraping skills needed to get more data in the data collection phase and you probably will need this data in your data science project.
First, if you have no idea what web scraping is and the reasons why you should learn it, and why data scientists need it, please head over to my previous article .
I’m going to go through each resource individually and give you a brief introduction of the material and what I liked about it without going into depth about the content.
So let’s jump into the very first one:
1. Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python 2021
I think it is a fantastic course especially because it focuses on Beautiful Soup and requests which are the first things that you learn in web scraping with Python.
So let’s look at some of the things that you’re going to learn and go over in this course.
There are 12 sections to this course.
- Learn the fundamentals of Web Scraping
- Implement APIs into your applications
- Master working with Beautiful Soup
- Start using requests-html
- Create functioning scrapers
- Scrape JavaScript
- Familiarize yourself with HTML
- Get the hang of CSS Selectors
- Make HTTP requests
- Understand website cookies
- Explore scraping content locked behind a log-in system
- Limit the rate of requests
The first one is the fundamentals of web scraping; basically goes over the difference between scrapers and crawlers and the ethics of web scraping.
And then you’re gonna go into Beautiful Soup and Requests libraries that are the libraries to get you started in scraping so they are often the things that you need to know first.
The next thing is scraping Javascript which I’m not sure how it’s handled here with Beautiful Soup but most probably this is not about handling Javascript, it’s about getting the script tag from the page.
The next section is the CSS selectors which I don’t think is difficult to learn but it is very similar to other methods so it could be somehow overwhelming for beginners who are trying to figure things out and work through problems. But if you already really know web scraping, I wouldn’t think this is super challenging.
Who can take this course? Beginners in the field who want to learn Beautiful Soup and Requests.
2. Web scraping: Python Beautiful Soup Web scraping Bootcamp
Sections of the source:
- Python
- Webscraping
- BeautifulSoup Library
- Webscraping Case Studies
- Why webscraping for Data Science
- Webscraping Portfolio Projects
- Requests Library
- Web Mining
The first part of this course talks about the importance of web scraping
for data science and then goes over the web scraping process using Beautiful Soup . The third and fourth parts are practical discussing
scraping premier league data and movies.
Who can take this course? Beginners in the field and people interested in data.
3. Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup for Data Science
Sections of the course:
- Web Scraping
- Beautiful Soup
- Data Extraction
- Web Scraping for Data Science
- Data Mining
- Data Scraping & Data Cleaning
The course goes over basic concepts of web scraping using Beautiful Soup and is very practical moving from one beginner-level project to
intermediate-level and advanced-level one.
Who can take this course? Everybody interested in Web Scraping even data professionals.
BONUS: Experimental Web Scraping for Data Science
Now, this is an ebook, not a course.
This is the ebook that I recently wrote for my friends. Frankly, I was going to shoot a course but I didn’t have the opportunity to screen record it so I decided to write an ebook that should have the same value as the course.
Covering the following topics:
- What is web scraping?
- How to parse the HTML web page with Beautiful Soup
- How to find HTML tag(s) with or without attributes
- How to extract links and multiple tags
- How to go up the DOM tree
- How to go sideways in the tree
- How to deal with multiple pages
- How to store the web data into a data frame
- How to export your data into CSV or JSON
- How to use API to get data
Many have been looking for the simplest way to get started in web
scraping and, but have not yet found a good and affordable resource
to learn from. So I’ve written this ebook to help you get started
knowing web scraping using Requests to get the URL request and Beautiful Soup to parse (understand) the HTML code.
I also did three projects web scraping quotes and scraping Hackernews
using Beautiful Soup and also using its API.
Who can take this course? Not only absolute beginners in web scraping who want to get a light approach to get you started, but also if you’re a data analyst or a data scientist. Even if you’re a marketer, a new startup; having limited API connections, or a fresh grad and aspiring to learn web scraping. This ebook can help you.
This is simply the best affordable resource you can see online about web scraping. It’s not just about the content, it’s about the community you’re going to join and get answers to all your questions.