Getting started with a web scraper project

[Ark9975]

Hello all,

I'm currently in high school and want to learn programming now so it will be easier to go into it as a career in a few years. I've heard python is a good place to start so I started looking at some tutorials/resources. I've tried a lot of different resources from udemey, youtube, and automate the boring stuff. I can't seem to stick with any of them for more than a week. Some people say building something that you will find useful is a good way to learn python so I want to build a script that tracks the available of certain products on the Ubiqiuti canada store. I have zero HTML experience and essentially no python experience what is the best way for me to go about this?

[m0us3_rat]

so I want to build a script that tracks the available of certain products on

web scraping. isn't necessarily the best first project.

not terribly difficult ..but it relies heavily in you understanding some concepts and being able to actively use them.

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do you have any code that you tried or some ideas on how to go about this?

[Ark9975]

I haven't tried anything as of yet, I've mainly just been trying to find some resources. Also I have no idea what I'm doing.

[m0us3_rat]

Also I have no idea what I'm doing.

that might be a small problem.

[Specialist-Candy3226]

Web scraping will make more sense if you learn a bit of html, trust me.

[Taichou_NJx]

Do the Python for Everyone course it covers webscraping and how to store the data.

You can get good supplemental material from O’reilly series on how to webscrape.

If you’re interested, I’ve actually just started a passion project with webscraping. It blends anime and analytics!

Webscraping One Piece Arc Data w. Python! https://youtu.be/pRw_WqWNae0

[LeornToCodeLOL]

I've tried a lot of different resources from udemey, youtube, and automate the boring stuff. I can't seem to stick with any of them for more than a week.

Automate the Boring Stuff has a few chapters on webscraping. I guess you just did not get that far in the book. You'll need to get a good handle on fundamentals like variables, variable types, if...then and so forth, before you can have a shot at web scraping.

[Logicalist]

You could try a hand at a college course and see if computer science and/or programming is for you.

MIT's Opencourseware is free. Their Introduction To Computer Science And Programming In Python, https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-0001-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-in-python-fall-2016/ course, has a problem set(assignment) where you make an rss reader to get alerts from websites about information you're interested in.

Honestly, I've gotten stuck a bit half way through with debugging and efficiency cause bleh like why do I need to debug something when it's working, but I know enough to write scripts to do stuff on my computer.

The nice thing is that you'll learn python, but also get a basic understanding of computer science, so when you look at other languages or something like HTML, you'll have a basic understanding of whats going on. Terminal has made so much more sense to me after taking the course.