Hi.
My name is Janani Ravi,
and welcome to this course on Scraping Your First Web Page with Python.
A little about myself,
I have a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford
and have worked at companies such as Microsoft,
Google, and Flipkart.
At Google I was one of the first engineers working on
real-time collaborative editing in Google Docs,
and I hold four patents for its underlying technologies.
I currently work on my own startup, Loonycorn,
a studio for high-quality video content.
Web scraping is an important technique that is widely used as the
first step in many work flows in data mining,
information retrieval, and text-based machine learning.
In this course, you will gain the ability to apply different scraping techniques,
including Beautiful Soup and Scrapy.
First, you will learn and use various HTTP client libraries,
such as requests, httplib2, and urllib to download HTML content.
Next,
you will discover how Beautiful Soup is an extremely popular Python library
that does better than regular expressions in important ways.
You will see how Beautiful Soup fixes a badly formed HTML and constructs
a nice parse tree that can be traversed and queried.
Finally, you'll add to your toolkit the knowledge of Scrapy,
which is a full-fledged web scraping framework that
combines the steps of retrieving and parsing web content
and does so at production scale.
When you're finished with this course,
you will have the skills and knowledge to identify the relative
strengths and use cases of different web retrieval and scraping
technologies such as regular expressions,
Beautiful Soup, and Scrapy.