"I loved the course and believed it was worth every penny!"
This course has been years in the making.
In 2012, I published a blog post titled "I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit" documenting some lessons I had learned scraping a few different sites.
The post shot to the top of Hacker News and has since been viewed by over 250,000 people. It resonated with people because of its simple but important lessons on pulling data from websites.
It has been used as required reading material in some college-level courses, and it even outranked the Wikipedia article when you searched for "web scraping" in Google.
In 2013, I published my first book titled "The Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping." The book has since sold thousands of copies to people from all kinds of backgrounds.
I heard from everyone from graduate students and software developers to small business owners and journalists. Many wrote in with praise for how the book had helped them finally understand the technical concepts and collect the data they were looking for.
The number one piece of feedback I got about the book was that people wanted more hands-on examples. They wanted to practice building scrapers for simplified sites that were easy to learn. Some people just wanted working code that they could tweak and use for their own purposes.
That's what led me to create Scrape This Site — the world's best place to learn web scraping. I wanted to create a site that was:
- Built for beginners — no technical background required
- Easy to follow, with simple step-by-step instructions
- Focused on the fundamentals that apply to every website
- Thorough, giving plenty of examples and use cases