title: Best way for a beginner to learn screen scraping by Python
body: <p>This might be one of those questions that are difficult to answer, but here goes:</p>
  
  <p>I don't consider my self programmer - but I would like to :-) I've learned R, because I was sick and tired of spss, and because a friend introduced me to the language - so I am not a complete stranger to programming logic. </p>
  
  <p>Now I would like to learn python - primarily to do screen scraping and text analysis, but also for writing webapps with Pylons or Django.</p>
  
  <p>So: How should I go about learning to screen scrape with python? I started going through the <a href="http://doc.scrapy.org/" rel="noreferrer" title="scrappy docs">scrappy docs</a> but I feel to much "magic" is going on - after all - I am trying to learn, not just do.</p>
  
  <p>On the other hand: There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, and if Scrapy is to screen scraping what Django is to webpages, then It might after all be worth jumping straight into Scrapy. What do you think?</p>
  
  <p>Oh - BTW: The kind of screen scraping: I want to scrape newspaper sites (i.e. fairly complex and big) for mentions of politicians etc. - That means I will need to scrape daily, incrementally and recursively - and I need to log the results into a database of sorts - which lead me to a bonus question: Everybody is talking about nonSQL DB. Should I learn to use e.g. mongoDB right away (I don't think I need strong consistency), or is that foolish for what I want to do?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you for any thoughts - and I apologize if this is to general to be considered a programming question.</p>