I agree. If I want to engage with my local government on a local issue (e.g. anti-social behaviour) I need data. The data is increasingly available on Web sites. Hence scraping and format conversion become important...

Yep.

Just the other day I was thinking -- I end up losing in debates because I'm unable to cite data. Scraping and acquiring data is a key part of research, so I'm very much looking for a text that presents the big picture as well as the nitty gritty details from beginning to end.