Do you want to learn more about web scraping? This article is here to help you. This article provides you with a long list of the top best web scraping books you can purchase online to hone your web scraping knowledge.
What is Web Scraping?
In layman's terms, web scraping is the process of extracting data from public websites. Because there are so many sites out there, web crawling programs have been created to automatically collect data by searching the websites for certain bits of information (Web Scraping).
As you may imagine, the vast majority of this data is being gathered in HTML format. Structured data, such as a spreadsheet or database, can then be created from this unstructured data and used in different forms.
It can be extremely useful for businesses and organizations that want to keep up with current trends or for those who want to learn more about a certain topic of interest. With such a high demand for Web Scraping, the books I'll be presenting next aim to teach it. In no particular sequence are the books mentioned.
20 Web Scraping Books for Beginners in 2024
Python Web Scraping Books
Python Web Scraping is the first set of web scraping books I'm going to cover.
1. Web Scraping with Python — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Learning Python
- Price: 49 USD (Paper Back), 10.9 USD -28.9 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Ryan Mitchell
- Date of Publication: March 21, 2018
- Language: English
The first web scraping book on this list is Web Scraping with Python. Extensive new material has been added to the original text, making it a one-stop resource for learning how to scrape almost any form of data from the current internet.
2. Python Web Scraping Cookbook — Best Python Web Scraping Book with High-Performance for Learning about Crawlers
- Price:99 USD (Paper Back), 19.79 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Michael Heydt
- Date of Publication: February 9, 2018
- Language: English
These strategies will help you build high-performance scrapers and deal with crawlers, sitemaps and forms automation, Ajax-based websites with caching as well as Ajax-based sites with caching. Every stage of product development and lifecycle management will be discussed in detail in a variety of real-world situations. For example, you'll learn how to design and build dependable data flows, as well as publish your coding to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
3. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python — Best Web Scraping Book for Learning Python Code
- Price:49 USD (Paper Back), 23.99 USD (eTextbook), 56.95 USD (Spiral-bound)
- Author: Al Sweigart
- Date of Publication: November 12, 2019
- Language: English
Gone are the days when you have to get scraping done by hand for hours. You can now get things done in minutes with only a few lines of Python code in this updated second edition of the bestseller Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. Learning the fundamentals of Python as well as exploring its extensive collection of modules for accomplishing specialized tasks, such as collecting data from websites, reading PDF and Word documents, and automating clicks and typing.
New chapters on input validation, automating Gmail and Google Sheets, and auto-updating CSV files round out the second edition of this worldwide bestseller.
4. Practical Web Scraping for Data Science — Best for Updated Approach to Web Scraping with Python
- Price:11 USD – 65.49 USD (Paper Back), 35.00 USD – 53.99 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Seppe vanden Broucke
- Date of Publication: April 19, 2018
- Language: English
Using Python as the programming language, this book gives a comprehensive and up-to-date approach to web scraping without skipping over key aspects or best practices. Scraping and the web technologies in which it functions are examined in depth in this book, which is intended for data science students and professionals alike.
5. Hands-On Web Scraping with Python — Best Book for Learning Web Scraping Strategies
- Price:99 USD (Paper Back), 15.24 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Anish Chapagain
- Date of Publication: July 15, 2019
- Language: English
Scraping data from online pages via web scraping is a common practice in many businesses. Web scraping strategies and approaches are covered in depth in this book. It will teach you the basics of web scraping and how it can be used for a variety of different online sites.
As a guide to web scraping principles and technologies, it shows you how to utilize the best tools and approaches to scrape online pages more effectively. Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs are also covered, as are other popular web scraping technologies. Using Python and a variety of other commonly used tools, you'll learn how to effectively scrape the web.
6. Python Automation Cookbook — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Gaining Foundational Knowledge about Web Scraping
- Price:24 USD (Paper Back), 17.19 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Jaime Buelta
- Date of Publication: September 27, 2018
- Language: English
By working on real-world activities, including creating your first scraping application, analyzing data to produce spreadsheet reports, and communicating through automatically generated emails, this book will provide you with the foundational knowledge you need to automate business operations.
I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in automating tedious manual chores linked to corporate operations like finance, sales, and HR. Having a decent grasp of Python will help you get up and running quickly.
7. Getting Structured Data from the internet — Best for Learning Python Code
- Price:99 USD (Paper Back), 15.00 USD – 39.99 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Jay M. Patel
- Date of Publication: November 13, 2020
- Language: English
Python scripts are shown in this book authored by Jay, who shows you how to collect data from large-scale web crawls, transform it into a variety of useful forms (such as JSON, Excel and CSV), and then store it in a SQL database of your choosing.
8. Python for Data Analysis — Best for Learning Python Programming Language
- Price:70 USD (Paper Back), 13.20 USD – 36.79 USD (Kindle), 77.95 USD (Spiral-bound)
- Author: Wes McKinney
- Date of Publication: September 25, 2017
- Language: English
In order to help you become a successful data analyst, the author of this book, Wes, aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Python programming language and its data-oriented library ecosystem and tools. It's perfect for analysts who are new to Python and for Python programmers who are new to data science and scientific computation. Data files and associated data can be found on GitHub and can be found in the book itself.
9. Learning Scrapy — Best for Learning Data Harvesting and Python Programming
- Price:85 USD – 34.99 USD (Paper Back), 17.19 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Dimitrios Kouzis-Loukas
- Date of Publication: January 30, 2016
- Language: English
Web scraping, which has been long overdue, is finally covered in this book, allowing you to quickly and easily retrieve meaningful data from nearly any source. The book begins with an introduction to the Scrapy framework before delving into how to harvest data from a variety of sources, clean it up, and customize it to your specific needs using Python and third-party APIs. After that, you'll learn how to use Spark Streaming to do real-time analytics on the scraped data stored in databases and search engines. You will be able to scare data for your apps with ease after reading this book.
10. Go Web Scraping Quick Start Guide — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Data Extraction and Programming Language
- Price:99 USD (Paper Back), 10.69 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Vincent Smith
- Date of Publication: January 30, 2019
- Language: English
This book by Vincent will rapidly teach you how to use Go libraries like Colly and Goquery to extract data from different websites. It begins with an overview of web scraping and the Go programming language, as well as instructions for setting up a Go environment. After that, it discusses HTTP requests and replies and how Go deals with them. You'll also get a crash course on web scraping protocol.
11. Website Scraping with Python: Using BeautifulSoup and Scrapy — Best Book for Learning How to Use Python to Scrape Websites
- Price:99 USD (Paper Back), 17.31 USD – 23.74 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Gabor Laszlo Hajba
- Date of Publication: September 14, 2018
- Language: English
This book gives a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to web scraping in Python without the need for glossaries. If you want to learn how to use Python to scrape websites, this book is a good place to start. I suggest reading Chapter 2 since it describes the data collection job that is implemented throughout the majority of the book. However, if you're just interested in one single subject, such as Scrapy, you can skip to Chapter 4.
12. A Python Guide for Web Scraping — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Exploring Python Tools and Web Scraping Techniques
- Price:95 USD (Paper Back), 9.95 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Pradumna Milind Panditrao
- Date of Publication: May 18, 2021
- Language: English
This book explains the relevance of web scraping using Python in this regard. Web crawling is shown in real-time. In other words, it means that web scraping can be automated. It provides details on the various online scraping tools and libraries, allowing users to have a comprehensive understanding of web scraping's capabilities and existence.
13. R Web Scraping Quick Start Guide: Techniques and tools to crawl and scrape data from websites — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Gaining Basic Knowledge about R Programming
- Price:99 USD – 29.99 USD (Paper Back), 14.59 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Olgun Aydin
- Date of Publication: October 31, 2018
- Language: English
If you want to learn how to scrape web pages utilizing R programming, this book is for you. Xpath and RegEx, two critical components for scraping website data, will be covered in detail. We'll walk you through the process of web scraping from beginning to end. You'll be able to develop and test RegEx and XPath rules with the help of this book.
This course will teach you how to gather URLs and then develop XPath rules for your first web scraping script using rvest library. Calculate the statistics and construct R plots to show them off using the data you've collected.
To wrap things off, you'll learn how to utilize R and Selenium drivers to do the more complex scraping. R will be used to connect to an AWS-hosted PostgreSQL database. By the conclusion of this book, you will be able to build whole web scraping systems using R from the ground up.
14. Getting Started with Beautiful Soup — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Learning How to Use BeautifulSoup to Scrape Websites
- Price:99 USD (Paper Back), 12.64 USD (Kindle)
- Author: Vineeth G. Nair
- Date of Publication: January 24, 2014
- Language: English
Beautiful Soup in Python: A Beginner's Guide is a tutorial for getting started with Beautiful Soup. Using easy examples and sample Python code, together with illustrations and images as needed, the book takes you step-by-step through the installation of every feature of Beautiful Soup. With the assistance of a genuine website and example code, the book explains how to extract data from a website and presents a simple solution.
Getting Started with Beautiful Soup explains how to set up Beautiful Soup on a Windows or a Linux computer using several techniques. After that, you'll learn how to search, navigate, modify content, use encoding support, and format output using real-world examples and sample Python code for each one. This book provides step-by-step instructions on how to scrape data from almost any website. This book is for you if you want to learn how to effectively scrape pages from websites.
15. An Introduction to Data Analysis in R — Best Python Web Scraping Book for Practical and Easy Python Web Scraping Learning
- Price:23 USD (Paperback), 25.50 USD – 56.27 USD (eTextbook)
- Author: Alfonso Zamora Saiz
- Date of Publication: July 28, 2020
- Language: English
Current data analysis that uses the R programming language is made simple and practical in this book. There are chapters on R programming principles, data collecting and pre-processing, data visualization, and statistical approaches, including multivariate analysis, and contain tasks at the conclusion of each session. There are no advanced statistics skills required to use this book since it combines statistical and mathematical concepts with R implementation and real-world applications. Finance, economics, statistics, Math, and business students who are interested in a career in data analytics are the primary audience for this textbook. Master students in data science, as well as industry experts, would benefit from this course.
PHP Web Scraping Books
PHP Web Scraping is the next set of web scraping books I'm going to cover.
16. Guide to Web Scraping with PHP — Best PHP Web Scraping Book for Learning Various Ways to Extract Data from the Internet
- Price: 24 USD (Paperback)
- Author: Matthew Turland
- Date of Publication: August 26, 2019
- Language: English
PHP Web Scraping is covered in detail in this book. This book, published by scraping specialist Matthew Turland, provides an overview of the many ways to scrape the web, from simple to more advanced methods. Using a variety of frameworks and technologies.
As far as I'm concerned, this book is the finest introduction to scraping in PHP. However, if you already know a lot, you can not get much out of this book in terms of fresh information. There are several code examples and comparisons of various HTML parsers and scrapers in the book.
17. Instant PHP Web Scraping — Best PHP Web Scraping Book for Learning How to Develop Scrapers for Reuse
- Price:99 USD (Paperback)
- Author: Jacob Ward
- Date of Publication: July 26, 2013
- Language: English
Web scraping with PHP is made simple with the help of this wonderful book!. You'll pick it up in a flash! A short, sweet, and to-the-point guide that gets right to the point. For future applications, it shows you how to develop a scraping class that can be reused. For easy data extraction from any website. How to provide a good basis for future web scraping topics, in addition
Simple to more complex subjects is covered in a short 48-page book. You won't get lost since the chapters build on one another. One of the simplest and greatest books on PHP web scraping I've ever come across!
18. Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers — Best PHP Web Scraping Book for Learning Easy Ways to Scrape Web Data
- Price:37 USD (Paperback)
- Author: Michael Schrenk
- Date of Publication: March 30, 2007
- Language: English
Michael Schrenk, a well-known webbot developer, tells you how to make the data you extract from websites simpler to understand and analyze in this well-acclaimed book. Saving time by automating purchases, auction bids and other internet operations. Using the code in the book is a great way to learn how to create a Web Scraper for the first time.
Java Web Scraping Books
Java Web Scraping is the last set of web scraping books I'm going to cover.
19. Instant Web Scraping With Java — Best Java Web Scraping Book for Learning Java Language
- Price:99 USD (Paperback)
- Author: Ryan Mitchell
- Date of Publication: August 26, 2013
- Language: English
For web scrapers, this is a great resource. Web scraping strategies and processes in Java are covered in this book in bite-sized chunks. “Instant Web Scraping with Java” is the book's main subject. Inexperienced Java programmers who are eager to learn can benefit greatly from Instant Web Scraping. The Java language and its merits are explained in full, step-by-step, in these extensive directions.
When it comes to web scraping, Java tends to be seen as more of a scripting language than an enterprise language. You can construct really helpful tools that address extremely tough issues by combining Java's robustness and extensibility with web scraping's flexibility and power.
Setting up your Java setup is easy by using Instant Web Scraping with Java, which will walk you through the process step-by-step. Creating basic web scrapers and crawler networks will also be covered. Throughout the book, you will gain valuable advice, functional code, and other resources to help you become an expert in the subject matter.
20. The Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping — Best Java Web Scraping Book for Learning and Honing Web Scraping Skills
- Price: 15 USD
- Author: Hartley Brody
- Date of Publication: February 18, 2017
- Language: English
In this book, Hartley Brody shares all of the methods and insights he has learned while working in the field. In order to improve one's web scraping abilities, the Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping was created. A sample code is also included in the book. Additionally, despite some widespread criticism, the author argues that online scraping is a legitimate method of obtaining data and material and explains why.
You'll learn how data is transmitted from a website to the end user's computer and how web scraping intercepts this process to retrieve the data you want! It is a must-read for everyone interested in learning about web technologies, discovering and extracting data, and everything in between!
FAQs
Q. What are the required skills to scrape websites?
Before you can scrape websites, you need some basic skills like learning programming language, learning JS, CSS, and HTML coding skills, and the ability to inspect web page elements.
Conclusion
This article has finally come to an end. It is my belief that you now have the basic idea of the various web scraping books out there in the market. The publications mentioned above, as well as the advice you can acquire from other web scrapers on the internet, will all be helpful in getting you started.
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