February 2024
Beginner
352 pages
8h 16m
English
book
Learn Python the Hard Way: A Deceptively Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Data Science, 5th Edition
by Zed A. Shaw
Content preview from Learn Python the Hard Way: A Deceptively Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Data Science, 5th Edition
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Exercise 52
Scraping Data from the Web
The two most popular uses of Python are data science and web scraping because web scraping typically feeds data to your data science pipeline. If you have an application that needs beer sales, then scraping it off the ATF TTB website is probably your only solution. If you need to train a GPT model on text, then scraping it off various forum websites is a good option. The web has so much data available; it’s just in unfriendly visual formats.
Web scraping is also a great beginner topic for many of the same reasons as data munging:
It’s something everyone understands because they use browsers all day long. Most people have some concept of what a web page is.
Web scraping doesn’t require a ton of theory or ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.