Have you ever wanted to extract data from websites but didn’t know where to start? I recently learned web scraping in just 1 hour, and in this post, I’ll share exactly how I did it, the resources I used, and my first hands-on project. If you're a beginner, this guide will help you get started quickly.

🎯Why Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process of automating data extraction from websites. It’s useful for:
Collecting product prices for comparisons
Gathering research data
Automating repetitive tasks (like scraping YouTube video details)
And much more!
Since I was curious about web scraping and wanted to learn fast, I decided to take the 1-hour course by FreeCodeCamp on YouTube.

📚 The Resource That Taught Me EverythingInstead of jumping into lengthy documentation, I found an easy and practical tutorial:
📌 FreeCodeCamp’s Web Scraping with Python Course

Duration: 1 hour
Library Used: BeautifulSoup
Project-Based: Real-world example included
This tutorial was perfect for beginners because it explained the concepts in a simple way and included a project to apply what I learned.

🛠️ Tools & SetupTo follow along, I set up my environment with:
Python (make sure you have it installed)
BeautifulSoup (for parsing HTML)
Requests (to fetch web pages)
To install the necessary libraries, run:

pip install beautifulsoup4 requests

🔥 My First Web Scraping Project After learning the basics, I decided to put my skills to the test by creating a simple project: scraping YouTube channel information (like the name, subscribers, and description).
Project Breakdown:Fetch the YouTube Channel Page using requests.
Parse the HTML using BeautifulSoup.
Extract Channel Name & Subscribers Count.
Display the Results in a readable format.

Here’s a simplified version of my script:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

url = 'https://www.youtube.com/@freecodecamp'  # Example channel URL
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}  # Avoid bot detection

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')

# Extract the title (channel name)
channel_name = soup.title.string
print(f'Channel Name: {channel_name}')

🚀 Why BeautifulSoup?
After experimenting with BeautifulSoup, I highly recommend it for beginners because:
✅ It’s easy to learn (no complicated setup)✅ You can start scraping within an hour✅ It works great for static websites
If you need to scrape dynamic websites (those that load content using JavaScript), you might need Selenium or Scrapy, but for starting out, BeautifulSoup is the best choice!

🎯** What I Learned in 1 Hour**
✅ Web scraping is not as hard as it sounds.
✅ BeautifulSoup makes extracting data super simple.
✅ Always check a website’s robots.txt to see if scraping is allowed.
✅ Practicing with a real project is the best way to learn.