You can learn web scraping by studying the basics of a programming language like Python or Node.js. There are many free practical tutorials and guides to understand the fundamentals. And after some practice, you can build your own projects to find and solve new challenges.
However, we understand that there are hundreds of resources out there, and it’s hard to pick the right ones.
To help you avoid tutorial hell and increase your chances of a successful career or project, we’ve put together a roadmap for you to follow and learn everything you need to start collecting data like a master!
Note: In this list, you’ll find the best resources to learn web scraping for every level. Although we recommend you follow the order in the list, feel free to work it at your own pace.
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1. What is Web Scraping?
Learn a simple definition of web scraping and see an example of a web scraping script.
2. How Does Web Scraping Work?
Understand the different parts of a web scraper and what a good scraper looks like. You’ll also learn how to create a script to collect data from https://quotes.toscrape.com/.
3. What is Web Scraping Used For?
Let’s explore the different web scraping applications to expand your knowledge of what’s possible.
4. How and Why You Should Hide Your IP Address
Before you start putting your IP address at risk, let’s learn the various ways to hide your IP to avoid getting your scrapers blocked.
5. How to Choose a Web Scraping Tool
There are plenty of web scraping tools available, but how do you choose one and why? Learn everything about web scraping tools, their features, and what you should look for when making a decision.
Beginner Web Scraping Projects
Reading isn’t enough! Let’s start creating a few projects in Python and Node.js to put the theory into practice:
1. Learning Web Scraping with Python
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how websites are structured and how to use their structure to target the desired data by building a www.indeed.com scraper using Python.
2. Learning Web Scraping with Node.js
For those that prefer JavaScript over Python, this tutorial explores the different options to scrape web data using Node.js – including dynamic content!
3. Dealing with Paginated Pages
It’s very common for websites to have some sort of navigation, and we can use it to access deeper pages on a website. In this tutorial, you’ll build a spider using Python and Scrapy.
4. Building Your Own Parsers with CSS
Before you can start developing your own projects, you need to learn more about CSS selectors and the different combinations you can use to traverse the DOM tree.
5. Extract Tabular Data from the Web
A lot of data is displayed on tables because it’s easier for people to understand it this way. That means that being able to scrape tabular is necessary to collect information efficiently.
In this tutorial, you’ll build a scraper to extract data from static HTML tables using Node.js – Here’s a Python version if you prefer this language.
Extra Resources
If you want to learn web scraping using a different programming language, we have entry-level tutorials for C#, Ruby, Go, PHP, and R.
Deepen Your Web Scraping Skills
Now that you understand the basics of web scraping and have some experience writing your own code, let’s start building some more complex projects to further your skills:
1. Grabbing and Using the Right HTTP Headers
Although it’s not a super complex project, finding the right HTTP headers can make your scrapers more resilient to anti-scraping systems – but you can leave that to ScraperAPI 😉.
2. Extract Data from LinkedIn
LinkedIn has a lot of publicly available job data we can scrape as long as we understand how they build their pages. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Chrome’s DevTools to find and extract data from an AJAX request.
3. Scrape Dynamic Tables without a Headless Browser
Not all tables are built equally. Some tables use AJAX to inject their content on the page, which makes it harder to extract the data. Fortunately, we can use the same principle from the LinkedIn project above to find the data we need.
4. Learn to Use Async and Await to Scrape Football Data
In this article, you’ll learn how to create a web scraper using asynchronous JavaScript to make your scraper more resilient to errors or slow response times.
5. Getting Competitors’ Ad Data
Web scraping is a tool. The idea is to collect the necessary data to allow you to gain an edge against the competition, make better decisions or automate a process. In this article, we’ll extra ad data from Google Search to see where our competitors are investing their budget.
Build Your Own Projects
You are now ready to start building your own projects to find and solve new challenges. It’s important to understand that every website is built differently, so the only way to get better at web scraping is by developing your problem-solving skills and expanding your knowledge.
Look for interesting websites you’d like to get data from or think about potential applications you could use web scraping to develop.
Here’s some inspiration to get you started:
- Build a stock market scraper to monitor stocks’ prices. You can even take it further and build a dashboard showing the data.
- Scrape eBay to find great deals or build a comparison site to show the same product ordered by its price in different listings.
- Launch a newsletter with scraped job opportunities from Glassdoor.
- Extract trend data to predict the demand for keywords, products, or topics.
- Build a custom idea generator by scraping the Etsy marketplace.
Remember, web scraping is both an art and a science, so it’s important that you master the different tools at your disposal to be prepared for the next challenge.
Learn more
- Learn more about web scraping in our blog – it’s full of guides and projects you can build to master your skills
- Find the right ScraperAPI toolFind the right ScraperAPI tool for your project – no matter if you can’t code, we got you covered!
- Discover how data scientists can use web scraping to improve machine learning models.
- More frequently asked questions about web scraping and data extraction
