Web scraping education is a swamp. It is mostly blog posts that show you a request and a selector, work for a fortnight, and leave you helpless the moment a site adds a challenge page. Apify Academy is the exception and it is not close. The structure is sensible, with beginner courses covering scraping basics in JavaScript and in Python plus the platform itself, and an advanced tier covering API scraping, anti scraping protections and expert crawler work.
It is free, it does not ask for a card, and the advanced material is not held back as the paid part. The anti scraping course is the reason I rate this highly. Almost everything written on that subject is a list of tricks to defeat a defence, presented with a wink. This explains what the defences actually are, why sites deploy them, how fingerprinting and rate limiting and challenge systems work as engineering, and what that implies for how you should behave.
Understanding the mechanism is what separates somebody who can build a scraper that survives from somebody who has memorised a user agent string. Teaching it as systems knowledge rather than as a cheat sheet is the correct call and it is rare. The API scraping material is similarly grown up, and pointing people at a site's own endpoints before they reach for a headless browser is advice that will save a great deal of pain. My first complaint is the commercial gravity.
The beginner courses are genuinely portable and you could finish them and go and use anything, but the advanced track increasingly assumes you will run this on Apify, with actors and the platform's storage and proxy layer woven into the examples. That is fair enough for free education produced by a company, and it does mean the further you get the more you are learning a product. Worth going in with that expectation. The larger gap is legal and ethical.
A course teaching people to extract data at scale from sites that did not invite them should engage seriously with terms of service, with the messy and jurisdiction dependent state of scraping case law, with personal data and its regulation, and with the difference between public and merely accessible. There is some coverage and it is much lighter than the subject deserves, and it sits oddly next to the technical rigour everywhere else. The other omission is maintenance. Building a scraper is a day, keeping fifty of them running as sites change under you is the actual job, and there is little here on monitoring, alerting on silent failure, or the slow grind of selector rot.
Four. The strongest free curriculum in its category, marked down for treating the law as somebody else's problem and for pulling steadily toward its own platform.