Today I Learned How to Scrape Book Data from a Website Using Python!

Hey everyone! 👋

Today I dove into the world of web scraping for the first time — and I want to share exactly what I learned. It’s super exciting to write a Python script that grabs real data from a website and saves it to a file. No more copy-pasting manually!

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What I Scraped

I chose this cool practice site called BooksToScrape.com. It’s made just for scraping, so it’s perfect for beginners like me.

From the first page, I was able to get:

• The title of each book

• The price

• Whether it’s in stock

• The book’s rating (like 1 to 5 stars)

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The Code I Wrote

Here’s the Python script that made it all happen:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import csv

url = "https://books.toscrape.com/"
response = requests.get(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

books = soup.find_all("article", class_="product_pod")

with open("scrapped.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as file:
    writer = csv.writer(file)
    writer.writerow(["Title", "Price", "Availability", "Rating"])

    for book in books:
        title = book.h3.a["title"]
        price = book.find("p", class_="price_color").get_text()
        availability = book.find("p", class_="instock availability").get_text(strip=True)

        rating_map = {
            "One": 1,
            "Two": 2,
            "Three": 3,
            "Four": 4,
            "Five": 5
        }
        rating_word = book.find("p", class_="star-rating")["class"][1]
        rating = rating_map.get(rating_word, 0)

        writer.writerow([title, price, availability, rating])

print("DONE!")

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How It Works

• I used requests to fetch the webpage.

• BeautifulSoup helped me parse the HTML and find the book info.

• Each book is inside an <article> tag with the class "product_pod".

• For each book, I grabbed the title, price, availability, and rating.

• The rating was a bit tricky because it’s hidden inside a class name like "Three" — so I created a dictionary to convert that to a number.

• Finally, I saved everything to a CSV file.

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What I Got

When I opened the CSV, I saw neat rows like:

(And lots more!)

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What’s Next?

Right now, my script only scrapes the first page. But this site has multiple pages — so my next step is to figure out how to:

• Click through to the next page automatically,

• Scrape every page,

• And save all that data in one big CSV file.

I can’t wait to share that journey with you all next time!

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Final Thoughts

Web scraping feels powerful and fun! I’m excited to keep learning and improve my skills. If you’re curious about web scraping, I highly recommend trying out BooksToScrape.com — it’s a great way to start.

Thanks for reading my first web scraping post!