Start collecting your own data! Learn how to use Python and Beautiful Soup to scrape the web and download data from APIs in this interactive web scraping course.
Why learn web scraping?
A data analyst or data scientist doesn’t always get data handed to them in a CSV or via an easily accessible database. Sometimes, you’ve got to go out and get the data you need.
The ability to collect unique data sets can really set you apart from the pack, and being able to access APIs and scrape the web for new data stories is the best way to get data nobody else is working with.
Start setting yourself apart from the pack by signing up for a free account and diving into our APIs and Web Scraping course right now.
What’s in this APIs and web scraping course?
The course begins with several lessons about accessing and using data from APIs. Among other things, you’ll learn to use Python to:
- Create and process API requests
- Deal with data in the JSON format using Python and pandas
- Deal with pagination
- Handle more advanced requests like POST requests, PUT/PATCH requests, DELETE requests, etc
You’ll apply your new API skills to a challenge by working with the reddit API to do some real-world data analysis.
From there, the course moves into web scraping using Python and Beautiful Soup and the requests library. Among other things, you’ll learn how to:
- Request and download a website’s HTML content
- Retrieve specific elements from the page with Beautiful Soup
- Use Find All, IDs, and Classes to extract specific parts of a page
- Use CSS selectors, including nested CSS selectors
While each API and each web page has its own unique quirks, by the end of this course you’ll be comfortable with extracting data via APIs or via web scraping.