Best Web Scraping Books

1. Web Scraping with Python: Collecting Data from the Modern Web
$25

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.

2. Web Scraping with Python
$22.90

This book is aimed at developers who want to use web scraping for legitimate purposes. Prior programming experience with Python would be useful but not essential. Anyone with general knowledge of programming languages should be able to pick up the book and understand the principals involved.

3. Learning Scrapy
$34

This book covers the long awaited Scrapy v 1.0 that empowers you to extract useful data from virtually any source with very little effort. It starts off by explaining the fundamentals of Scrapy framework, followed by a thorough description of how to extract data from any source, clean it up, shape it as per your requirement using Python and 3rd party APIs. Next you will be familiarised with the process of storing the scrapped data in databases as well as search engines and performing real time analytics on them with Spark Streaming.

Top Web Scraping Frameworks & Libraries - For this post, we have scraped various signals (e.g. technical maturity, popularity of the library, size of the community behind the library, social media mentions etc.) for several scraping frameworks from web. We have fed all above signals to a trained Machine Learning algorithm to compute a score and rank the top open source libraries.

The readers will love our list because it is Data-Driven & Objective. Enjoy the list:

---

1. Requests

Requests allows you to send organic, grass-fed HTTP/1.1 requests, without the need for manual labor. There's no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your POST data. Keep-alive and HTTP connection pooling are 100% automatic, powered by urllib3, which is embedded within Requests.

---

2. Scrapy

An open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way.

---

3. Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.

---

4. Selenium with Python

Selenium Python bindings provides a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. Through Selenium Python API you can access all functionalities of Selenium WebDriver in an intuitive way.

---

5. lxml

xml is the most feature-rich and easy-to-use library for processing XML and HTML in the Python language. The lxml XML toolkit is a Pythonic binding for the C libraries libxml2 and libxslt. It is unique in that it combines the speed and XML feature completeness of these libraries with the simplicity of a native Python API, mostly compatible but superior to the well-known ElementTree API.

---

6. Webscraping with Selenium - part 1

Excellent, thorough 3-part tutorial for scraping websites with Selenium.

---

7. Extracting data from websites with Scrapy

Detailed tutorial for scraping an e-commerce site using Scrapy.

---

8. Scrapinghub

Scrapy Cloud, our cloud-based web crawling platform, allows you to easily deploy crawlers and scale them on demand – without needing to worry about servers, monitoring, backups, or cron jobs. It helps developers like you turn over two billion web pages per month into valuable data.