10 Best Web Scraping Courses and Certifications Online

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites using automated tools. With the large and ever-growing amount of data available online, web scraping has become an increasingly important skill for businesses and individuals alike. As a result, there is a plethora of online courses available that promise to teach you the best practices and tools for web scraping. This article aims to provide an objective evaluation of some of the most popular web scraping courses available online, in order to help you make an informed decision about which course best suits your needs.

Here’s a look at the Best Web Scraping Courses and Certifications Online and what they have to offer for you!

10 Best Web Scraping Courses and Certifications Online

1. Modern Web Scraping Fundamentals with Python by Jordan Sauchuk, Ligency I Team, Ligency Team (Udemy) (Our Best Pick)

The “Modern Web Scraping Fundamentals with Python” course, taught by Jordan Sauchuk, Ligency I Team, and Ligency Team, aims to help data scientists improve their web scraping skills using Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium. The course teaches students how to build a safe and effective web scraper, and covers topics such as data spoofing, crawling libraries, maintenance, and monitoring. Students will learn the essentials of web scraping, set up a Scrapy crawler, utilize the basics of BeautifulSoup, and deploy Selenium. The course also includes practical challenges and a cybersecurity project, as well as access to a student forum for interaction and inspiration. Upon completion, students will be able to build their own web scrapers and optimize internal processes.

2. Modern Web Scraping with Python using Scrapy Splash Selenium by Ahmed Rafik (Udemy)

The Modern Web Scraping with Python using Scrapy Splash Selenium course is designed to teach individuals how to become experts in web scraping and web crawling using Python 3, Scrapy, Splash, and Selenium. The course covers the fundamentals of web scraping, building a complete spider, XPath & CSS selectors, locating content in the DOM, storing data in various formats, writing custom pipelines, Splash, scraping JavaScript websites, crawling behavior, avoiding bans, building custom middleware, web scraping best practices, scraping APIs, and more.

This course stands out from others as it is the most updated course using Python 3.7, Scrapy 1.6, and Splash 3.0. The course includes an in-depth, step-by-step guide to becoming a professional web scraper, using Splash & Selenium to scrape JavaScript websites, and hosting spiders in Heroku. Additionally, the course teaches students how to create a custom script to run spiders periodically without intervention. Udemy offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Student reviews of the course are overwhelmingly positive, with students praising the quality of instruction and the course content. The course is broken down into several sections, including Scrapy Fundamentals, XPath expressions & CSS Selectors, Project 1 Spiders from A to Z, Building Datasets, and several others.

Overall, the Modern Web Scraping with Python using Scrapy Splash Selenium course is a comprehensive guide for those seeking to learn web scraping and web crawling using Python 3 and various tools. The course covers a wide range of topics and is suitable for individuals of varying programming backgrounds.

3. Scrapy: Powerful Web Scraping & Crawling with Python by GoTrained Academy, Lazar Telebak (Udemy)

The “Scrapy: Powerful Web Scraping & Crawling with Python” course is offered by GoTrained Academy, taught by Lazar Telebak, a full-time web scraping consultant. The course is designed to teach participants how to scrape websites and build a powerful web crawler using Scrapy, Splash, and Python. The course provides practical projects and real-world examples of web scraping popular websites. It is the only course with over 10 hours of playable content and an active Q&A board to answer any questions. Additionally, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Scrapy is a Python package that is useful for web scraping and extracting structured data, which can be used for data mining, information processing or historical archival. Web scraping is a technique for gathering data or information from web pages, whereas web crawling is the first step in data research. Web crawlers can scan the World Wide Web and extract information automatically. Scrapy is a new Python package that aims to provide easy, fast, and automated web crawling. It is built on top of Twisted, which is an asynchronous networking framework, making it efficient.

Scrapy provides many functions required for downloading websites and other content on the internet, making the development process quicker and less programming-intensive. Moreover, it tries to solve content extraction and navigation to relevant pages for extraction. In Scrapy, the core concept is the Spider, which is a Python object with a few special features. This course covers the fundamentals of using Scrapy and then focuses on advanced features, such as creating and automating web crawlers.

This Scrapy tutorial covers topics such as the differences between Scrapy and other Python-based web scraping libraries, creating a Scrapy project, exploring XPath commands, building advanced Scrapy spiders, Scrapy architecture, and web scraping best practices.

4. Web Scraping In Python: Master The Fundamentals by Maximilian Schallwig (Udemy)

Course title: “Web Scraping In Python: Master The Fundamentals”
Course instructor: Maximilian Schallwig

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites by analyzing the HTML code and identifying patterns. This course aims to teach the fundamentals of web scraping and crawling, enabling learners to extract relevant data from websites for their own analysis. The course includes a practical work example to guide learners through the learning process.

The course covers important topics such as static data extraction/web scraping, scraping websites that load data with Javascript, and APIs overview. Learners are expected to have some prerequisite knowledge before enrolling in the course. Upon completion, learners should be confident in using Python code to extract data from most common websites.

5. Web Scraping in Nodejs & JavaScript by Stefan Hyltoft (Udemy)

This course, titled “Web Scraping in Nodejs & JavaScript,” aims to teach web scraping through practical examples using real websites such as Craigslist, iMDB, and AirBnB. The course covers various tools such as JavaScript Nodejs Request, Cheerio, NightmareJs, and Puppeteer. The course also utilizes the newest JavaScript ES7 syntax with async/await.

The course covers how to scrape a Craigslist website for software engineering jobs and how to scrape advanced websites such as iMDB and AirBnB using NightmareJs and Puppeteer. The course also discusses reverse engineering websites to find hidden APIs, how to avoid being blocked by websites, and what to do if your scraper is blocked. The course teaches how to scrape on a server with a bad connection, and how to save your results to a CSV file and MongoDB.

The course includes sections on topics such as building a scraper that scrapes every 1 hour and deploying it to a cloud host like Heroku or Google Cloud, scraping sites requiring passwords, serving scraping results in a REST API with Nodejs Express, and building a React frontend that shows the results. Another section covers how to make a basic GraphQL API. The course also includes a section on how to scrape Facebook using only Request.

The course is divided into multiple sections covering topics such as required software, intro to CSS selectors and scraping tools, scraping HTML tables with Request/Cheerio, handling network problems, scraping sites with pagination and authentication, scraping Nordstrom.com to find a secret API, and saving scraping data to MongoDB. The course ends with a student Q&A section and a bonus section on the instructor’s other Node.js courses.

Overall, the course aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of web scraping and its practical applications using Nodejs & JavaScript.

6. Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python by 365 Careers (Udemy)

This course, titled “Web Scraping and API Fundamentals in Python” by 365 Careers, teaches web scraping using Beautiful Soup and requests-html, API harnessing, and data collection automation. It aims to provide learners with the necessary skills to extract valuable data in a cost-effective and efficient manner. The course begins with an exploration of APIs and the JSON format, moving on to web scraping using libraries like Beautiful Soup and requests-html. It also covers HTML basics and includes several practical projects to help learners develop a feel for real-world scraping scenarios.

The course is designed to help individuals automate the repetitive task of data collection and become proficient in data extraction. From reporting to data science, the course is relevant to those seeking to stay ahead of the competition in a data-driven world. The course also covers common roadblocks that may arise while scraping and presents ways to circumnavigate or deal with those problems.

The course is structured with a hands-on approach and includes plenty of homework exercises, downloadable files and notebooks, as well as quiz questions and course notes. The 365 Data Science Team has collaborated with Andrew Treadway, a Senior Data Scientist for the New York Life Insurance Company and the author of the ‘yahoo_fin’ package. The course is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The course is structured into several sections, starting with an introduction to the course and setting up the environment. The course then covers working with APIs, HTML overview, web scraping with Beautiful Soup, practical project on scraping Rotten Tomatoes, scraping HTML tables, practical projects, common roadblocks when scraping, and the requests-html package.

Overall, this course is designed to provide learners with the necessary skills to extract valuable data quickly and efficiently, thereby automating the task of data collection.

7. Web Scraping with Python: BeautifulSoup, Requests & Selenium by GoTrained Academy, Waqar Ahmed (Udemy)

This course titled “Web Scraping with Python: BeautifulSoup, Requests & Selenium” is being offered by GoTrained Academy and Waqar Ahmed. The course description states that Web Scraping is a technique for extracting large amounts of data from websites and saving it to a local file or database. The course teaches web scraping using Python 3 and Beautiful Soup, a free open-source library that parses HTML.

In addition to Beautiful Soup, the course also uses lxml, an extensive library for parsing XML and HTML documents quickly. The Requests module is used instead of urllib2, due to its improvement in speed and readability. Selenium is also introduced alongside Beautiful Soup for crawling AJAX & JavaScript driven pages. The course covers diverse data extraction techniques and methods of handling and organizing data.

The course covers several topics, including data structures, how websites are hosted on servers, calls to the server (GET, POST methods), HTML and CSS review, an overview of Requests Module and BeautifulSoup Module, parsing HTML using BeautifulSoup, filtering elements, JavaScript and AJAX overview, Selenium and the need for it, CSS selectors, XPath selectors, and navigating pages using Selenium.

The course also includes several practical projects, including scraping customer reports, coding bat website with Beautiful Soup, and web scraping one’s own Instagram account. The course also covers web scraping best practices and includes bonus content on data extraction with APIs and Scrapy, a powerful web scraping and crawling framework in Python.

Upon completion of the course, learners will understand how websites and servers function, diverse data extraction techniques, and methods for handling and organizing data. The course is structured into several sections, including a review of data structures, how servers work, installing required Python packages, introduction to Requests Python Library, introduction to Beautiful Soup Python Library, and searching the parse tree using Beautiful Soup.

8. Web Scraping 101 with Python3 using REQUESTS, LXML & SPLASH by Ahmed Rafik (Udemy)

The course titled “Web Scraping 101 with Python3 using REQUESTS, LXML & SPLASH” is being offered by Ahmed Rafik, and is designed for individuals who are beginners in web scraping using Python. The course aims to teach students how to automate data extraction from websites in a matter of minutes. The course is ideal for data analysts, web developers, and freelancers who are interested in generating a dataset, scraping products from online stores, monitoring product prices, automation, machine learning, or freelance web scraping.

The course provides an introduction to the most commonly used web scraping tools and frameworks, and helps students understand and locate data from web pages using XPath and CSS selectors. The course covers the fundamentals of LXML, HTTP requests with Python, scraping simple HTML pages, scraping multiple web pages, extracting data from APIs, using Splash to scrape JavaScript websites, authentication/login, and storing extracted data. The course is project-based, and includes assignments/exercises in each section to help students gain hands-on experience.

The course instructor, Ahmed Rafik, is an experienced web scraping expert who has taught over 2000 students around the world. He is known among his students as the “web scraping Ninja”, and holds a master’s degree in computer science. The course is guaranteed by Udemy, and students can request a refund within 30 days of enrollment if the course does not meet their expectations.

The course is divided into several sections, including Getting Started, LXML core fundamentals, XPath & CSS Selectors, HTTP Requests with Python, Project 1: Simple & Clean, Project 2: Recursion, Project 3: APIs, Splash crash course, Project 4: Scraping JavaScript websites using Splash, Requests and LXML, Project 5: Authentication/Login, and a bonus section.

9. Learn Web Scraping with NodeJs in 2021 – The Crash Course by Grohs Fabian (Udemy)

The “Learn Web Scraping with NodeJs in 2021 – The Crash Course” is a course designed for individuals interested in learning about web scraping and data mining with NodeJs. The course includes instruction on modern methods of scraping with NodeJs, such as Puppeteer and direct NodeJs requests. Participants will learn how to build scraper modules for websites like IMDB, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as multiple ways of scraping and when to choose them. Additionally, the course covers ethics, do’s and don’ts of scraping, and real-world examples and problem solving.

The instructor, Grohs Fabian, has over two years of experience in data mining with NodeJs and has developed best practices for creating scrapers. The course is designed for both beginners and individuals with some knowledge of web scraping. Participants will have access to all files and code samples and will be able to work alongside the instructor as they learn each concept and scraper module.

The course will cover several modules, including an introduction, more information, and concepts, as well as instruction on IMDB simple scraper, Instagram user simple scraper, and Twitter scraper with Puppeteer. The course will also cover scraping methods like request method, Puppeteer method, and NightmareJs method. By the end of the course, participants will have the knowledge and confidence to create their own scraper with NodeJs.

10. Web Scraping in Python With BeautifulSoup and Selenium 2022 by Christopher Zita (Udemy)

The course titled “Web Scraping in Python With BeautifulSoup and Selenium 2022” is a project-based course that teaches the most current methods of web scraping using Python with BeautifulSoup and Selenium. The course is designed for data scientists, web developers, and anyone interested in data science and web scraping.

The course covers the essentials of web scraping, explores the framework of a website, and helps students prepare their local environment for web scraping challenges. The course then progresses to cover the basics of using BeautifulSoup, including the utilization of the requests library and LXML parser. Students will also learn how to scale up to deploy a new scraping algorithm to scrape data from any table online, and from multiple pages.

The course then helps students set up Selenium to deal with JavaScript-driven webpages, and use the unique functions of Selenium to interact with pages. Students will combine the concepts of BeautifulSoup and Selenium to create effective scrapers to deal with some of the most challenging websites. Finally, the course teaches students how to make web scraping fully automatic by running their scraper at a specific time each day.

This course is unique because it is the most updated, project-based course that covers some of the most well-known websites. Students will have an in-depth step-by-step guide on how to become a professional web scraper. The course teaches students how to use Selenium to scrape JavaScript websites and how to create a fully automated web scraping script that runs periodically without any intervention from the user.

The course includes an introduction, followed by sections covering topics such as how websites are displayed, basics of BeautifulSoup, searching and extracting from HTML, Project #1- Scraping a Table, Project #2- Dealing with Multiple Pages, JavaScript Driven Webpages, Selenium, Project #3- Infinite Scrolling, Project #4- Twitter, and Project #5- Automating Python Scripts.