4 lessons
Understanding CAPTCHAs
What CAPTCHAs actually check, the different kinds you'll encounter, and why there's no clean universal way to defeat them.
Avoiding CAPTCHAs and Recovering From a Ban
Why staying under the radar beats solving CAPTCHAs, how to spot a block in code, and a step-by-step plan for when a site starts returning 403 on everything.
What to Scrape and What Not To
A concrete, practical line between reasonable scraping and targets you should leave alone — going beyond "check robots.txt" into specific categories of data and sites.
What's Still Genuinely Hard to Scrape
An honest accounting of targets that remain difficult or impractical to scrape even with every modern tool in this course, and why.