Developing Bots with Selenium Python: For Web Scraping, Test Engineering, Data Mining, and Automation (Mepso Media Bot Development Series)

If you've ever done a fair amount of test automation with Selenium Webdriver, then you will not find anything that's particularly advanced in this book. It promises Web scraping as the first marketable topic on the front cover which I was mainly drawn to as well as writing bots, but not necessarily test automation.Disappointingly, though this book doesn't add anything new beyond basic Selenium scripting - hardly any python code as the title might suggest. The example scripts take up most of the pages in the book and there's a brief description of what the script is doing. I was interested to know how the author goes about solving CAPTURE on websites. But the author stated that he uses paid CAPTURE services. But then goes ahead to describe how he would handle the CAPTURE on the author's website which isn't real because it shows real legible letters - hardly a conundrum!There are lots of typos in the book which was immediately noticeable and some sentences don't make sense. The content refers you to later chapters (almost the end of the book) so information jumps around a bit. There is talk of stories of the author's successes and some story with the FBI, which I wasn't interested in as there was nothing to glean from them given the already (IMO) sparse technical information in the book. There is some theory in the last chapters but they aren't very long and seem to skim over the topics. The book isn't very long.If you've never used selenium, then you might find the book useful as a beginner. But then again, there are plenty of useful free resources about how to go about writing your scripts with useful code for ensuring robustness and maintainability. I was looking for a book that would go into advanced technical details regarding web scraping and writing bots - as a bare minimum. However, I'm returning the book.

So I know Python and have used selenium a couple of times and I now have a requirement to do something more complex.While the book was waiting to be delivered I pretty much worked out the basics of getting my data and put together a rough prototype and went on to add some more function to select data and iterate over pages and I frames but my code was rough.The book arrived and at first I was cool on first look after my initial success but I started on the early chapters and now I have a sophisticated program which logs what it is doing, randomly waits, aggregates data from different sources and gets them ready to load into my excel spreadsheet.Maybe it’s not rocket science but it saved me lots of time and I am happy.

I bought this book about two weeks ago and I have gone through a lot of it. I am not a professional programmer, but I found the lessons to be easy to follow and I enjoyed the exercises. The videos that accompany the writings are well thought out and they bring everything together. Really enjoyed learning about how bots function and the way they can be used in the real world.