This is a great text spanning most of the tools, methods and philosophies underpinning web scraping.
It’s main problem is a lack of identity: is it teaching web scraping to those with one or two simple tasks, looking to just dip their toe in, or those looking to build production quality web scrapers for large scale tasks? As such it jumps to and fro in the tools it suggests. The start of the book seems lightweight and much of it is replaced by recommendations later in the text. This could be made much clearer from the start.
Having said that, Mitchell’s textbook is fairly thorough on the topic, and rewards those who persevere through the start with the more nuanced sides of web scraping (multithreading/processing, solving captchas, finding APIs).