Building a Web Scraper in Rust

Web scraping is a great intermediate Rust project. It combines async programming, HTML parsing, error handling, and data serialization — all core skills that apply to larger projects.

We will use reqwest for HTTP requests, scraper for CSS-selector-based parsing, and tokio for async runtime. The combination gives us a scraper that can fetch hundreds of pages concurrently without blocking.

The key insight is that Rust's ownership model prevents the race conditions and memory issues that plague concurrent scrapers in other languages. Each task owns its data. There is no shared mutable state. The compiler guarantees correctness before the program runs.