What is scrapfly?

Is Scrapfly free?

Or did you know it was a "pay-to-play" site?

(There are only about 30 scrapbook kits!)

There's nothing wrong with this. I don't see anything shady. If you want to pay, you can. But if you're going to do that then you should also be honest and tell the potential scrapbooker that you are.

And no, I'm not saying she didn't know. I'm just saying we don't know that.

As a side note, I saw her there recently, and she was super nice! She's the sweetest!

Is web scraping worth learning?

There are several good reasons why you might want to learn web scraping.

The most obvious reason is that there are a lot of cool tools that can be used to extract data out of websites and other data sources. There are also many data science frameworks for doing web scraping at a beginner level.

If we're going to do any serious data science, let alone make money at it, then we're going to need to handle loads of data and have a basic understanding of how to extract data. This kind of knowledge can be taught through free online courses like the Coursera one for R programming. Even though R is great for data manipulation, it doesn't teach how to use HTML or how to extract data from a website. Web scraping is just one example of something you can learn online.

The problem with online learning. The problem is that there are a million places on the Internet you can look up the information. It's easy to skim through articles and see some things you could possibly use. That article probably isn't giving you an actual step-by-step process for achieving the goal. It's like when you're trying to learn to program. There are some programs that give you a solid foundation to build your skills. But those programs tend to assume you already know how to program. They'll show you how to use an API but won't teach you how to actually program.

Learning should be an active process. For one, you should be learning by creating projects yourself. You shouldn't be reading about it in magazines and newspapers. They don't provide much depth. They just show you enough to get you off and running but not as much as you actually need to get to a goal. But for another, the online options can be too big of a space. There is just so much to see online. How do you know if what you're seeing online is really an optimal strategy?

When we learn to program, it helps when someone gives us advice. A lot of us start getting frustrated when everything we're seeing online doesn't help us build our own applications. But the real value is not knowing how to create things. The value is knowing what to do if you're faced with certain problems. When you're faced with certain problems, you learn by trying.