Best Web Scraping Courses - Find Out Which One Is Best For You

Ștefan Răcila on Apr 10 2023

Best Web Scraping Courses - Find Out Which One Is Best For You

Web scraping is a critical skill in today's data-driven world. With the abundance of data available on the internet, the demand for web scraping skills has never been higher. It is used by businesses, researchers and individuals to gather information, generate leads and track trends.

Before you can start scraping the web, you need to learn the skills and tools to do it effectively. That's where web scraping courses come in. These courses provide an in-depth understanding of web scraping techniques, tools and best practices. In this article, we will take a look at some of the best web scraping courses available today.

Modern Web Scraping with Python using Scrapy Splash Selenium

https://www.udemy.com/course/web-scraping-in-python-using-scrapy-and-splash/

This course, offered by Udemy, is designed for beginners and covers the basics of web scraping using the Python programming language. It uses the Scrapy framework alongside Splash and Selenium. It covers topics such as parsing HTML and XML, navigating the DOM, JavaScript rendering and extracting data from websites.

You will be using Python 3.7, Scrapy 1.6 and Splash 3.0. You will have an in-depth step by step guide on how to become a professional web scraper. You will learn how to use Splash & Selenium to scrape JavaScript websites. You will learn how to host spiders in Heroku as well as Splash. You will learn how to create a custom script so spiders can run periodically without any intervention from you.

Prerequisites:

• Basic Python Knowledge

Course Time: 8.5 hours

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Overall a great course for anyone who wants to scrape data from the web.

Web Scraping in Node.js & JavaScript

https://www.udemy.com/course/web-scraping-in-nodejs/

In this course you will learn how to scrape data from the web with practical examples on real websites. You are going to use Node.js, Cheerio, NightmareJs and Puppeteer. You will be using the newest JavaScript ES7 syntax with async/await.

You will learn how to scrape a Craigslist website for software engineering jobs using Node.js and Cheerio. You will then learn how to scrape more advanced websites that require JavaScript rendering such as iMDB and AirBnB using NighmareJs and Puppeteer.

You are also going to learn how you can even avoid wasting time on creating a web scraper in the first place, by reverse engineering websites and finding their hidden API's!

Prerequisites:

• Basic experience HTML
• Basic experience jQuery
• Basic experience Nodejs

Course Time: 10.5 hours

Rating: 4.3 out of 5

Using Python to Access Web Data

https://www.coursera.org/learn/python-network-data

This course will show how you can treat the Internet as a source of data. You will scrape, parse, and read web data as well as access data using web APIs. You will work with HTML, XML, and JSON data formats in Python. This course will cover Chapters 11-13 of the textbook “Python for Everybody”.

It is an optional prerequisite that you read the first 10 chapters of the book. The topics discussed in those chapters include variables and expressions, conditional execution (loops, branching, and try/except), functions, Python data structures (strings, lists, dictionaries, and tuples), and manipulating files.

Prerequisites:

• Basic Python Knowledge

Course Time: 19 hours

Rating: 97%

Web Scraping in R

https://www.datacamp.com/courses/web-scraping-in-r

This course will teach you how to effectively gather and download data from any website using R. You will learn how to automate the process of scraping and parsing Wikipedia with the help of the rvest and httr packages. By participating in hands-on exercises, you will also gain a deeper understanding of HTML and CSS, the foundational elements of web pages. This will enable you to make your data collection processes more efficient and less prone to errors.

Prerequisites:

• Intermediate R
• Introduction to the Tidyverse

Course Time: 4 hours

These are just a few examples of the many web scraping courses available. It's important to note that the course you choose will depend on your current skills and what you want to achieve.

Conclusion

In this article, we have looked at some of the best web scraping courses available today. We've covered a range of online courses providers so that you can choose the best one for you.

In conclusion, if you're interested in learning how to scrape the web, there's never been a better time to start. With a wide range of web scraping courses available, you can choose the one that best fits your needs and skill level. Whether you're looking to learn the basics of web scraping or advanced techniques for working with large datasets, there's a course out there for you.

However, using a professional scraper is better than creating your own because it saves time, effort and resources. Professional scrapers are built to handle big data, they have high-speed performance, and they are equipped with advanced features such as CAPTCHA solving and IP rotation. These features help professional scrapers to evade detection and to scrape data from websites that are hard to access.

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