This book assumes prior programming experience and would most likely not be suitable for absolute beginners. The web scraping examples require competence with Python and installing modules with pip. If you need a brush-up there is an excellent free online book by Mark Pilgrim available at http://www.diveintopython.net. This is the resource I originally used to learn Python.

The examples also assume knowledge of how webpages are constructed with HTML and updated with JavaScript. Prior knowledge of HTTP, CSS, AJAX, WebKit, and Redis would also be useful but not required, and will be introduced as each technology is needed. Detailed references for many of these topics are available at https://developer.mozilla.org/.