From the course: Web Scraping with Python

What you should know - Python Tutorial

From the course: Web Scraping with Python

Start my 1-month free trial

What you should know

“

- [Instructor] So, this is not a Python course. It's a web scraping course that happens to use Python, but it does teach web scraping. So you should be familiar with the tools of the trade beforehand. You don't need to be a Python expert. I'm not sure if I'm a Python expert sometimes, but you should be familiar with Python syntax and programming concepts involving functions, so defining functions, arguments, calling functions, the usual classes, so that's classes, objects, methods, defining new classes and using objects in Python. We do a lot of extending classes in almost every section and overriding the parent methods in a couple of sections, and other Pythonic things. So list comprehensions, dictionaries. I love list comprehensions, really one of the best parts of Python, you should love them too. Nice to have regular expressions. So we do use them in a couple of cases, but feel free to learn them after the class too. You should also have some familiarity with the web. I'm going to put that in quotes. It's a little more nebulous, but listen, it's hard to automate something you don't know anything about, right? So HTML, you should know what HTML is. Know the parts of XML, tags, attributes, values, you know about IDs and classes in HTML. You should know the parts of web addresses, domains, paths, some notion of query parameters in HTTP. How a browser fetches files and loads webpages. So we're actually going to be discussing this one quite a bit and teaching it, understanding it as a huge part of web scraping. But if you're sitting there going, "What, web pages are made out of files?" Like you may want to hit the books a little bit and then circle back. Other than that, well, web scraping is a multidisciplinary field. We're going to be touching on a lot of things, learning a lot of things, you don't have to know or understand all of them right now. Whatever other skills you bring to the table, I'm sure you'll be fine.

Contents