Before we get to the actual course content,
let's take a look at some of the prereqs that you need to
have to make the most of your learning.
This course assumes that you're comfortable
programming in Python using Python 3.
We'll use Jupyter Notebooks, as well as Python script files to write code.
This course also assumes that you have some basic working knowledge of HTML,
CSS, and web pages.
We'll discuss the structure of HTML, but if you're completely unfamiliar,
that might be a little bit of an obstacle that you need to overcome.
If you don't seem to have the prereqs for this course,
here are some other courses on Pluralsight that you can watch first:
Python Fundamentals to get up and running with Python,
Your First Day with HTML, to get familiar with HTML markup.
Here is a quick look at what we'll cover in this course.
We'll start off by understanding what web scraping is and using client
libraries to download and fetch content from URLs.
Once we fetch content from the web,
we'll see how we can set up an HTML parse tree and navigate and
extract elements from this tree using Beautiful Soup.
From Beautiful Soup, we'll move on to working with Scrapy.
We'll use the Scrapy shell for interactive extraction of content.
And, finally,
we'll round off this course by automating our web
scraping operation using Scrapy spiders.