In this chapter, we will learn about and explore certain fundamental concepts related to web scraping and web-based technologies, assuming that you have no prior experience of web scraping. 

So, to start with, let's begin by asking a number of questions: 

• Why is there a growing need or demand for data? 
• How are we going to manage and fulfill the requirement for data with resources from the World Wide Web (WWW)?

Web scraping addresses both these questions, as it provides various tools and technologies that can be deployed to extract data or assist with information retrieval. Whether its web-based structured or unstructured data, we can use the web scraping process to extract data and use it for research, analysis, personal collections, information extraction, knowledge discovery, and many more purposes.

We will learn general techniques that are deployed to find data from the web and explore those techniques in depth using the Python programming language in the chapters ahead.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to web scraping
• Understanding web development and technologies
• Data finding techniques