Web Scraping Roadmap

Fetch web pages, parse HTML, extract data, and store it. From HTTP basics to JavaScript-rendered pages.

4 stages · 15 topics 0% done take the course: Web Scraping (67 lessons) ->
Web Scraping
✓ HTTP Basics for Scraping
✓ Understanding HTML Structure
✓ Foundations
✓ requests, Sessions & Headers
✓ CSS Selectors with BeautifulSoup
✓ Core Concepts
✓ Handling Pagination
✓ Scraping JavaScript-Rendered Pages
✓ Retries, Errors & Timeouts
✓ robots.txt & Scraping Ethics
✓ Intermediate Skills
✓ Legal Considerations
✓ Storing Scraped Data
✓ Advanced Topics
✓ Extracting with Regular Expressions
Text version of this roadmap

1. Foundations

  • HTTP Basics for Scraping: Understand HTTP requests and responses that power every scrape.
  • Understanding HTML Structure: Navigate the DOM and find the tags holding your data.
  • requests, Sessions & Headers: Persist cookies and set browser-like headers with requests.

2. Core Concepts

  • CSS Selectors with BeautifulSoup: Target elements precisely with CSS selectors.
  • Handling Pagination: Loop through multiple pages and collect all results.
  • Scraping JavaScript-Rendered Pages: Use Playwright to scrape pages rendered by JavaScript.

3. Intermediate Skills

  • Retries, Errors & Timeouts: Handle network failures with retries and backoff.
  • robots.txt & Scraping Ethics: Respect robots.txt and scrape responsibly.
  • Legal Considerations: Know the legal boundaries of web scraping.

4. Advanced Topics

  • Storing Scraped Data: Save results to CSV, JSON, and SQLite.
  • Extracting with Regular Expressions: Use regex to pull values from messy markup.