This book provides a complete and modern guide to web scraping, using Python as the programming language, without glossing over important details or best practices. Written with a data science audience in mind, the book explores both scraping and the larger context of web technologies in which it operates, to ensure full understanding. The authors recommend web scraping as a powerful tool for any data scientist’s arsenal, as many data science projects start by obtaining an appropriate data set. Starting with a brief overview on scraping and real-life use cases, the authors explore the core concepts of HTTP, HTML, and CSS to provide a solid foundation. Along with a quick Python primer, they cover Selenium for JavaScript-heavy sites, and web crawling in detail. The book finishes with a recap of best practices and a collection of examples that bring together everything you've learned and illustrate various data science use cases. What You'll Learn Leverage well-established best practices and commonly-used Python packages Handle today's web, including JavaScript, cookies, and common web scraping mitigation techniques Understand the managerial and legal concerns regarding web scraping Who This Book is For A data science oriented audience that is probably already familiar with Python or another programming language or analytical toolkit (R, SAS, SPSS, etc). Students or instructors in university courses may also benefit. Readers unfamiliar with Python will appreciate a quick Python primer in chapter 1 to catch up with the basics and provide pointers to other guides as well.

Learn web scraping and crawling techniques to access unlimited data from any web source in any format. With this practical guide, you’ll learn how to use Python scripts and web APIs to gather and process data from thousands—or even millions—of web pages at once. Ideal for programmers, security professionals, and web administrators familiar with Python, this book not only teaches basic web scraping mechanics, but also delves into more advanced topics, such as analyzing raw data or using scrapers for frontend website testing. Code samples are available to help you understand the concepts in practice. Learn how to parse complicated HTML pages Traverse multiple pages and sites Get a general overview of APIs and how they work Learn several methods for storing the data you scrape Download, read, and extract data from documents Use tools and techniques to clean badly formatted data Read and write natural languages Crawl through forms and logins Understand how to scrape JavaScript Learn image processing and text recognition

A hands on guide to web scraping and text mining for both beginners and experienced users of R Introduces fundamental concepts of the main architecture of the web and databases and covers HTTP, HTML, XML, JSON, SQL. Provides basic techniques to query web documents and data sets (XPath and regular expressions). An extensive set of exercises are presented to guide the reader through each technique. Explores both supervised and unsupervised techniques as well as advanced techniques such as data scraping and text management. Case studies are featured throughout along with examples for each technique presented. R code and solutions to exercises featured in the book are provided on a supporting website.

Get Started with Web Scraping using Python! Congratulations! By picking up this book, you've set the first steps into the exciting world of web scraping. For those who are not familiar with programming or the deeper workings of the web, web scraping often looks like a black art: the ability to write a program that sets off on its own to explore the Internet and collect data is seen as a magical and exciting ability to possess. In this book, we set out to provide a concise and modern guide to web scraping, using Python as our programming language, without glossing over important details or best practices. In addition, this book is written with a data science audience in mind. We're data scientists ourselves, and have very often found web scraping to be a powerful tool to have in your arsenal, as many data science projects start with the first step of obtaining an appropriate data set, so why not utilize the treasure trove of information the web provides. As such, we've strived to offer a guide that: Is concise and to the point, whilst also being thorough Is geared towards data scientists: we'll show you how web scraping fits into the data science workflow Takes a "code first" approach to get you up to speed quickly without too much boilerplate text Is modern by using well-established best practices and Python packages only Shows how to handle the web of today, including JavaScript, cookies, and common web scraping mitigation techniques Includes a thorough managerial and legal discussion regarding web scraping Provides lots of pointers for further reading and learning Includes many larger, fully worked out examples Chapter Overview Nine chapters are included in this book. In Chapter 1, we provide a brief overview on web scraping and real-life use cases and make sure your Python environment is set up correctly. In Chapter 2, you'll learn the basics regarding HTTP, the core piece of technology behind the web, and the requests Python library. In Chapter 3, we start working with HTML and CSS sites, using the Beautiful Soup library. Chapter 4 returns to HTTP, exploring it more detail. Chapter 5 introduces the Selenium library, which you'll use to scrape JavaScript-heavy websites. Chapter 6 explains web crawling in detail. In Chapter 7, an in-depth discussion regarding managerial and legal concerns is provided. Chapter 8 recaps best practices and provides pointers to other tools. Chapter 9 includes fourteen, fully worked out web scraping examples bringing everything you've learned together, and illustrates various interesting data science oriented use cases.

Collect and scrape different complexities of data from the modern Web using the latest tools, best practices, and techniques Key Features Learn different scraping techniques using a range of Python libraries such as Scrapy and Beautiful Soup Build scrapers and crawlers to extract relevant information from the web Automate web scraping operations to bridge the accuracy gap and manage complex business needs Book DescriptionWeb scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies. The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. You'll even cover the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.What you will learn Analyze data and information from web pages Learn how to use browser-based developer tools from the scraping perspective Use XPath and CSS selectors to identify and explore markup elements Learn to handle and manage cookies Explore advanced concepts in handling HTML forms and processing logins Optimize web securities, data storage, and API use to scrape data Use Regex with Python to extract data Deal with complex web entities by using Selenium to find and extract data Who this book is for This book is for Python programmers, data analysts, web scraping newbies, and anyone who wants to learn how to perform web scraping from scratch. If you want to begin your journey in applying web scraping techniques to a range of web pages, then this book is what you need! A working knowledge of the Python programming language is expected.

Learn to effectively manage data and execute data science projects from start to finish using Python Key FeaturesUnderstand and utilize data science tools in Python, such as specialized machine learning algorithms and statistical modelingBuild a strong data science foundation with the best data science tools available in PythonAdd value to yourself, your organization, and society by extracting actionable insights from raw dataBook Description Practical Data Science with Python teaches you core data science concepts, with real-world and realistic examples, and strengthens your grip on the basic as well as advanced principles of data preparation and storage, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and Python programming, helping you build a solid foundation to gain proficiency in data science. The book starts with an overview of basic Python skills and then introduces foundational data science techniques, followed by a thorough explanation of the Python code needed to execute the techniques. You'll understand the code by working through the examples. The code has been broken down into small chunks (a few lines or a function at a time) to enable thorough discussion. As you progress, you will learn how to perform data analysis while exploring the functionalities of key data science Python packages, including pandas, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Finally, the book covers ethics and privacy concerns in data science and suggests resources for improving data science skills, as well as ways to stay up to date on new data science developments. By the end of the book, you should be able to comfortably use Python for basic data science projects and should have the skills to execute the data science process on any data source. What you will learnUse Python data science packages effectivelyClean and prepare data for data science work, including feature engineering and feature selectionData modeling, including classic statistical models (such as t-tests), and essential machine learning algorithms, such as random forests and boosted modelsEvaluate model performanceCompare and understand different machine learning methodsInteract with Excel spreadsheets through PythonCreate automated data science reports through PythonGet to grips with text analytics techniquesWho this book is for The book is intended for beginners, including students starting or about to start a data science, analytics, or related program (e.g. Bachelor’s, Master’s, bootcamp, online courses), recent college graduates who want to learn new skills to set them apart in the job market, professionals who want to learn hands-on data science techniques in Python, and those who want to shift their career to data science. The book requires basic familiarity with Python. A "getting started with Python" section has been included to get complete novices up to speed.

Statistics, big data, and machine learning for Clojure programmers About This Book Write code using Clojure to harness the power of your data Discover the libraries and frameworks that will help you succeed A practical guide to understanding how the Clojure programming language can be used to derive insights from data Who This Book Is For This book is aimed at developers who are already productive in Clojure but who are overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of understanding required to be effective in the field of data science. Whether you're tasked with delivering a specific analytics project or simply suspect that you could be deriving more value from your data, this book will inspire you with the opportunities–and inform you of the risks–that exist in data of all shapes and sizes. What You Will Learn Perform hypothesis testing and understand feature selection and statistical significance to interpret your results with confidence Implement the core machine learning techniques of regression, classification, clustering and recommendation Understand the importance of the value of simple statistics and distributions in exploratory data analysis Scale algorithms to web-sized datasets efficiently using distributed programming models on Hadoop and Spark Apply suitable analytic approaches for text, graph, and time series data Interpret the terminology that you will encounter in technical papers Import libraries from other JVM languages such as Java and Scala Communicate your findings clearly and convincingly to nontechnical colleagues In Detail The term “data science” has been widely used to define this new profession that is expected to interpret vast datasets and translate them to improved decision-making and performance. Clojure is a powerful language that combines the interactivity of a scripting language with the speed of a compiled language. Together with its rich ecosystem of native libraries and an extremely simple and consistent functional approach to data manipulation, which maps closely to mathematical formula, it is an ideal, practical, and flexible language to meet a data scientist's diverse needs. Taking you on a journey from simple summary statistics to sophisticated machine learning algorithms, this book shows how the Clojure programming language can be used to derive insights from data. Data scientists often forge a novel path, and you'll see how to make use of Clojure's Java interoperability capabilities to access libraries such as Mahout and Mllib for which Clojure wrappers don't yet exist. Even seasoned Clojure developers will develop a deeper appreciation for their language's flexibility! You'll learn how to apply statistical thinking to your own data and use Clojure to explore, analyze, and visualize it in a technically and statistically robust way. You can also use Incanter for local data processing and ClojureScript to present interactive visualisations and understand how distributed platforms such as Hadoop sand Spark's MapReduce and GraphX's BSP solve the challenges of data analysis at scale, and how to explain algorithms using those programming models. Above all, by following the explanations in this book, you'll learn not just how to be effective using the current state-of-the-art methods in data science, but why such methods work so that you can continue to be productive as the field evolves into the future. Style and approach This is a practical guide to data science that teaches theory by example through the libraries and frameworks accessible from the Clojure programming language.