Gábor László Hajba - Website Scraping with Python: Using BeautifulSoup and Scrapy

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484239247 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Welcome to our journey together exploring website scraping solutions using the Python programming language!

As the title already tells you, this book is about website scraping with Python. I distilled my knowledge into this book to give you a useful manual if you want to start data gathering from websites.

Website scraping is (in my opinion) an emerging topic.

I expect you have Python programming knowledge. This means I wont clarify every code block I write or constructs I use. But because of this, youre allowed to differ: every programmer has his/her own unique coding style, and your coding results can be different than mine.

You can read this book from cover to cover if you want to learn the different approaches of website scraping with Python. If youre interested only in a specific topic, like Scrapy for example, you can jump straight to Chapter because it contains the description of the data gathering task we will implement in the vast part of the book.

Many people have contributed to what is good in this book. Remaining errors and problems are the authors alone.

Thanks to Apress for making this book happen. Without them, Id have never considered approaching a publisher with my book idea.

Thanks to the editors, especially Jill Balzano and James Markham. Their advices made this book much better.

Thanks to Chaim Krause, who pointed out missing technical information that may be obvious to me but not for the readers.

Last but not least, a big thank you to my wife, gnes, for enduring the time invested in this book.

I hope this book will be a good resource to get your own website scraping projects started!