Training Areas

  1. HTML basics. Styling and visual aspects not important. Focus on how data is represented in HTML (tables, forms) plus use of classes and ids. Codeacademy course: HTML Basics
  2. Javascript.
    1. Codeacademy course: Introduction to Javascript
    2. Another very good tutorial: https://javascript.info (also covers Chrome Developer Tools)
  3. jQuery. Focus on how CSS selectors work within jQuery. Visual web component manipulations not important. Codeacademy course: jQuery
  4. CSS selectors. Being proficient with CSS selectors helps a lot to write robots faster and smarter. Some learning resources:
    1. W3 documentation
    2. 30 well explained examples (ignore styling part)
    3. Detailed tutorial
  5. Chrome Developer Tools. Focus on inspecting DOM tree, network panel  (we use it to inspect API calls), Javascript Console. DevTools course on Code School. Useful Chrome documentation articles:
    1. Overview
    2. Inspecting DOM tree
    3. Network Panel
    4. Javascript Console
  6. SQL basics. This is a nice to have item which is not directly involved while coding robots. SQL may be needed to analyze data after robots collect it. Focus on SELECT statements. SQL Zoo tutorial.

Useful Tools

  1. SelectorGadget. A Chrome Extension that automatically suggests CSS Selectors for similar items on a web page.
  2. AJAX Capture. A Chrome Extension that captures AJAX requests on dynamic pages and generates Javascript code to mimic them. Useful when scraping dynamic pages.