Python Web Scraping in Practice (2nd Edition)

More than one book is titled "Web Scraping in Practice," and Hu Songtao's is the most widely circulated: first published in 2017, with a second edition in 2018 still in use, from Tsinghua University Press, and held by many university libraries across China. Its strengths are clear: it does not aim for theoretical completeness but walks through the most practical path—set up the environment, write small scripts, and pick a suitable scraping tool to accomplish one task. The most commendable change in the second edition is the full move to Python 3. The first edition used Python 2.7 and drew many complaints; the revision not only converts the code to Python 3 but adds Pyspider and an anti-scraping chapter, expanding from 294 to 381 pages. The first four chapters cover syntax and debugging, then warm up with small examples such as a multiplication table and multithreading, making it relatively friendly to readers without a programming background. From Chapter 5, the book adopts a contrastive "one need, one tool" approach: Scrapy for large data volumes, Beautiful Soup for simple page structures, Mechanize for logins, Selenium for JS rendering, and Pyspider for a graphical interface. This classification helps beginners quickly judge which tool a task calls for—a practical perspective rare in comparable books; each case covers environment preparation, code writing, and line-by-line explanation, and can basically be typed through. Shortcomings should be noted upfront: dependencies such as PhantomJS, Mechanize, and Pyspider are now mostly unmaintained, and the example sites have long since been redesigned, so the code may not run as-is; a Douban rating of 6.7 (40 ratings) also reflects dissatisfaction with depth and currency. Treat it as an introductory reader on scraping workflows and a tool map, not a code manual to copy long-term—understanding the ideas and migrating to Requests, Playwright, or newer Scrapy will yield more.