This Post Has 9 Comments

1. A good introduction
   This is a good introduction to a difficult subject. I have to give the author credit for writing this as the shelf life is likely not that long. Hopefully, he will update it as Python evolves.

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2. Five Stars
   Exceeded all expectations.

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3. Worst publishers and book ever purchased.
   This is the worst book we have purchased. It is simply a list of other books they want you to buy to get information you thought was in this book.You can not even send them feedback at the address they published in the book. Most attempted explanations are simple things best learned in a professional reference.Packetpubs books appears one of the worst of the bad publishers.

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4. Well written walk through
   Getting Started with Beautiful Soup by Vineeth G. Nair is a book that was easy to read and fun to follow along with.The book basically has four parts to it. The first part covers chapters 1 and 2 where you install Beautiful Soup and learn how to create objects. The second part covers chapters 3, 4 and 5 where you learn about searching through, navigating over and modifying the contents of the object. The third part covers chapters 6 and 7 where you learn about encoding and output formatters. The final part is chapter 8 where you use all the techniques you’ve learned in the earlier chapters to build a web scraper that gets price information on Packt Pub books from the publisher itself, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.The book is well written and is recommended to anyone who wants to learn how to work with Beautiful Soup.

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5. Four Stars
   I use this book a lot.

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6. NOT DRM-free !!!
   The Kindle version is NOT DRM-free, hence I give it one star. It is not acceptable that I cannot read this book on my computer — especially RE a computer language !!!Getting Started with Beautiful Soup

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7. Best in depth book for this subject let down by numerous typos
   This is the best book I could find to learn how to use Beautiful Soup.Unfortunately , the book has numerous typos, which made for a frustrating learning experience.Some of the codes do not work.Even his source codes downloaded from the publisher website have typos.The author has abandoned his book.Because there is only one erratum in the book’s errata page online.I would say use this book to learn Beautiful Soup but be prepared to fix half his typos to get his code to work.And the other half of the typos ? Just sigh and wonder.

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8. Dry, but complete and well-structured
   This book is suitable for people who know already what an object is, but not yet the difference between lxml and html5lib.It is very well structured and keeps example code minimal, but sufficient. For beginners it provides idiot-proof installation instructions and a lot of hints at mistakes one could make, even at very stupid ones. For more advanced programmers, the book proposes best practices and shows details that are not present in the online documentation.I have only one objection. The book is very dry and reading it is a bit tiring despite its limited and relatively simple subject. If the examples were funny or in another way entertaining, the book would be easier to read. Also, showing things in a more general perspective a few times would make reading easier and more satisfying. Even a simple explanation of the name “Beautiful Soup” would give an impression of the problem the package attacks.Before reading the book I had no experience with Beautiful Soup and was wondering how I could use it to deactivate links in foreign content I was including in my website. After spending 15 Minutes with reading the proper chapter in “Getting started with Beautiful Soup”, I had at least five possible solutions at hand. And it was obvious which one is best.

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9. Das meiste was im Buch steht, lässt sich auch mit kostenlosen Tutorials im Internet nachvollziehen.Außerdem funktionieren die Codeschipsel mit Python 3.X nicht mehr.Um die Beispiele herunterzuladen, verlangt der Verlag eine E-Mail-Adresse. Auf die bekommt man dann ungefragt täglich eine Werbe-E-Mail.

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