Scrapy is a free and open-source web crawling framework, written in Python. Scrapy is useful for web scraping and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival. This Python Scrapy tutorial covers the fundamentals of Scrapy.

Web scraping is a technique for gathering data or information on web pages. You could revisit your favorite website every time it updates for new information, or you could write a web scraper to have it do it for you!

Web crawling is usually the very first step of data research. Whether you are looking to obtain data from a website, track changes on the internet, or use a website API, web crawlers are a great way to get the data you need.

A web crawler, also known as a web spider, is an application able to scan the World Wide Web and extract information in an automatic manner. While they have many components, web crawlers fundamentally use a simple process: download the raw data, process and extract it, and, if desired, store the data in a file or database. There are many ways to do this, and many languages you can build your web crawler or spider in.

Before Scrapy, developers have relied upon various software packages for this job using Python such as urllib2 and BeautifulSoup which are widely used. Scrapy is a new Python package that aims at easy, fast, and automated web crawling, which recently gained much popularity.

Scrapy is now widely requested by many employers, for both freelancing and in-house jobs, and that was one important reason for creating this Python Scrapy course, and that was one important reason for creating this Python Scrapy tutorial to help you enhance your skills and earn more income.