A Practical Exercise in Web Scraping

Re:A Practical Exercise in Web Scraping by danso on Monday December 16, 2013 @11:55AM (#6915969)

I've always thought web scraping was one of the best ways to teach the practical use of code. My first practice with Ruby was to scrape apartment listings from Craigslist and concatenate it into one page for easy browsing. Simple to do, and useful to your real life, and as a bonus, more practice time with programming.

(obviously I don't endorse scraping Craigslist because of TOS. Just confessing to a past infraction back when the NYC housing market was even more absurd than it is today)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Practical Exercise in Web Scraping by wslh on Monday December 16, 2013 @11:59AM (#6916014)

It is also a good way to help friends because usually you give a lot of value to others very quickly.

In the same way, I also helped a birdwatcher to download thousand of bird calls. My own rant: http://blog.databigbang.com/the-call-of-the-web-scraper/

[ Parent | on HN ]