Learning Scrapy: Learn the art of efficient web scraping and crawling with Python

Packt Publishing, 2016. — 270 p. — ISBN 978-1-78439-978-8.his 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. By the end of this book, you will perfect the art of scarping data for your applications with ease
What you will learn
Understand HTML pages and write XPath to extract the data you need
Write Scrapy spiders with simple Python and do web crawls
Push your data into any database, search engine or analytics system
Configure your spider to download files, images and use proxies
Create efficient pipelines that shape data in precisely the form you want
Use Twisted Asynchronous API to process hundreds of items concurrently
Make your crawler super-fast by learning how to tune Scrapy’s performance
Perform large scale distributed crawls with scrapyd and scrapinghub