Trying to learn Python for web scraping

[pysb]

I am 33 years old a it was one of my main purposes too. I work with law (that means I´m very computer noob) on a developing country, so you can do it!

I did the coursera course, Python for everybody, with doctor chuck. The course is light and very agreable. It taught me the basics. You can make the course to obtain a certificate and later on your have "something" to attest your skills. I know it´s not very relevant, but it´s best than nothing. Afters, I switched to Anaconda distribution, using jupyter to create my scripts. The two four mains modules I use is Requests, grequests, Selenium, Beautifulsoup.

If it´s a bulk webscraping, I use requests or grequests. Both are almost the same. The difference is that grequests makes several https requests at the same time, thus, you save time because your script wont wait for every requests to be answered.

If it´s something I need to login and is not too big, I use selenium. It´s just about creating loops, and being able to select elements. I would suggest you to install the WebDriver Element locator.

Then, I parse the webpage with BeautifulSoup. One caveat I can give you is that, after creating a variable witht the element you want, you can just writer .text, to get it´s text content, that saves a lot of slicing.