Introduction

The amount of data available on the web is consistently growing both in quantity and in form.  Businesses require this data to make decisions, particularly with the explosive growth of machine learning tools which require large amounts of data for training.  Much of this data is available via Application Programming Interfaces, but at the same time a lot of valuable data is still only available through the process of web scraping.

This chapter will focus on several fundamentals of setting up a scraping environment and performing basic requests for data with several of the tools of the trade.  Python is the programing language of choice for this book, as well as amongst many who build systems to perform scraping.  It is an easy to use programming language which has a very rich ecosystem of tools for many tasks.  If you program in other languages, you will find it easy to pick up and you may never go back!