README.md

Book Price Tracker — Web Scraping & Email Alert System

This project is a simple web-scraping price tracker built using Python, requests, and BeautifulSoup. It monitors a product page on BooksToScrape.com, extracts the book title and price, and automatically sends an email notification when the price drops below a chosen threshold.

What the script does

• Fetches HTML from a book page

• Parses the page using BeautifulSoup

• Extracts:

  • Book name

  • Current price

• Compares the scraped price against a target value

• Sends an email alert through Gmail’s SMTP server if the price is low enough

This makes it useful as a beginner-friendly demonstration of:

• Basic web scraping

• HTML parsing

• Automating tasks with Python

• Using SMTP to send emails

• Simple data monitoring logic

Technologies Used

• Python 3

• requests

• BeautifulSoup4

• smtplib for email

• Gmail App Password for secure authentication

Notes

• Gmail now requires an App Password instead of a normal email password.

• The scraper includes a User-Agent header to avoid blocked requests.

• BooksToScrape is a public demo website specifically built for practicing scraping — safe and legal to use.