This book requires prior programming experience and would not be suitable for absolute beginners. When practical we will implement our own version of web scraping techniques so that you understand how they work before introducing the popular existing module. These examples will assume competence with Python and installing modules with pip. If you need a brush up, there is an excellent free online book by Mark Pilgrim available at http://www.diveintopython.net. This is the resource I originally used to learn Python.

The examples also assume knowledge of how web pages are constructed with HTML and updated with JavaScript. Prior knowledge of HTTP, CSS, AJAX, WebKit, and MongoDB would also be useful, but not required, and will be introduced as and when each technology is needed. Detailed references for many of these topics are available at http://www.w3schools.com.