New Course! Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python

Hi! I’m Nikola Pulev, a Physics graduate from the University of Cambridge turned Data Science practitioner and a course instructor at 365 Data Science… And I have exciting news coming your way – the release of our new course – Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python!

In this post, I’ll share with you what makes this course special and what cutting-edge skills it will help you develop. Finally, I’ll talk a bit more about myself and the co-author of the course, Andrew Treadway.

The 365 Data Science Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python Course

Andrew and I designed this course to teach you how to extract information from the web like a real pro. In today’s data-driven society, obtaining data fast and efficiently is a key skill to have. So, in this course, we’re showing you the different approaches to do that – extracting info from a webpage or using the public APIs to get structured data.

Who is this course for?

Data collection is an essential part of data science. So, if you are an aspiring data professional, it will be truly beneficial to understand how it’s done. On the other hand, we did our best to make a very practical course. So, even if you don’t plan to pursue a career in data science, you’ll gain enough knowledge to automate some daily routines… Or access interesting data about your hobby you didn’t have a clue about. The course is also a great fit for students looking for a comprehensive, engaging and highly interactive approach.

How is the course structured?

In the first part of the course, you’ll learn how to collect data through APIs (the most popular way to transmit data via the internet).

We’ll show you how to GET data from APIs and how to POST your own data contributions to APIs.

In the second part of the course, we focus on Web Scraping – the best alternative in the absence of APIs.

Here, you’ll learn how to leverage powerful libraries such as ‘Beautiful Soup’ and ‘requests HTML’ to scrape any website out there.

Well, at least the ones we are legally and morally allowed to.

We’ll also discuss common problems in Web Scraping and provide you with solutions or workarounds. In addition, we’ll talk more about scraping content dynamically generated by JavaScript.

Andrew and I wanted to make this Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python course as engaging as possible. That said, we hope you’ll enjoy the high-quality animations, additional course materials, quiz questions, handouts, course notes, and notebook files with commented code.

What skills will you acquire?

Once you complete the course, you’ll be able to:

• Use the fundamentals of Web Scraping
• Implement APIs into your applications
• Master working with Beautiful Soup
• Start using requests-html
• Create functioning scrapers
• Scrape JavaScript
• Familiarize yourself with HTML
• Get the hang of CSS Selectors
• Make HTTP requests
• Understand website cookies
• Explore scraping content locked behind a log-in system
• Limit the rate of requests

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? I could share many more details, but I’ll let you discover them on your own in the Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python Course Page.

About the authors

As I mentioned, I am a Natural Sciences graduate from the University of Cambridge, in the UK, with a passion for Mathematics, Physics, and Programming. In fact, I enjoy the subject matter so much I’ve taken part in multiple national and international competitions, where I’ve won numerous awards. I also hold a silver medal from the International Physics Olympiad. Despite my background, I am not doing much Physics nowadays. I found a new calling in data science and creating courses to help anyone advance in the field, regardless of their background. In fact, I am a firm believer that you don’t need high school or university to become proficient in a particular area. All you need is passion and a little guidance.

But I didn’t work on this project alone.

It’s a joint effort with Andrew Treadway. Andrew is an outstanding Senior Data Scientist with a Master’s degree in Computer Science with Machine Learning from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He’s been involved in data-related Python programming for more than 7 years. What’s more, he is also the creator of ‘yahoo fin’ – a popular Python library, designed to extract data from the Yahoo Finance website. To be fair, I was using his library long before I met him. Andrew’s help and input were invaluable to the creation of this course; and it was a complete pleasure to work together on this project!

The Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python Course is part of the 365 Data Science Program, so current subscribers can access the courses at no extra cost.

To learn more about the 365 Data Science Program curriculum or enroll in the 365 Data Science Program, please visit our Courses page.

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