Using Python to Access Web Data by University of Michigan

About this Course

This course will show how one can treat the Internet as a source of data. We will scrape, parse, and read web data as well as access data using web APIs. We will work with HTML, XML, and JSON data formats in Python. This course will cover Chapters 11-13 of the textbook “Python for Informatics”. To succeed in this course, you should be familiar with the material covered in Chapters 1-10 of the textbook and the first two courses in this specialization. These topics include variables and expressions, conditional execution (loops, branching, and try/except), functions, Python data structures (strings, lists, dictionaries, and tuples), and manipulating files.

Thank you for enrolling in Using Python to Access Web Data. This course will show how one can treat the Internet as a source of data. We will scrape, parse, and read web data as well as access data using web APIs. We will work with HTML, XML, and JSON data formats in Python. This course will cover Chapters 11-13 of the textbook 'Python for Informatics'.

We have put a lot of detail about the course into the document titled 'Syllabus' which can be found in Week 1, so please take a moment to review it. Week 1 also contains instructions for installing Python so you can develop and run the programs needed to complete this course. In previous courses, installing Python was optional but as we write more complex programs the Python Playground and auto-grader cannot handle the programs we will write in this class.

If you like what you see, you are welcome to encourage your friends to join the course. We leave registration open for several weeks and delay the first due dates to give late joiners a chance to join and catch up. If you are not joining late, the extended due dates for the first graded quiz and assignment are a good time to 'get ahead' in case later you need to take a week off from the class.

We will try to do live online office hours or face-to-face office hours from time to time so we have a chance to talk one way or another. Keep an eye out in your email for any announcements regarding office hours.

This is the third of four courses in the Python for Everybody specialization. We hope that you are successful in this course and continue with the rest of the courses in the specialization.

Again welcome to the course and best of luck in the class.