| Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Schrenk
Publisher: No Starch Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $18.87
You Save: $21.08 (53%)
Buy New/Used from $16.29
Avg. Customer Rating:   (13 reviews)
Sales Rank: 89420
Format: Illustrated
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 328
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 1593271204
Dewey Decimal Number: 025.04
EAN: 9781593271206
ASIN: 1593271204
Publication Date: March 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The Internet is bigger and better than what a mere browser allows. Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers is for programmers and businesspeople who want to take full advantage of the vast resources available on the Web. There's no reason to let browsers limit your online experience--especially when you can easily automate online tasks to suit your individual needs.
Learn how to write webbots and spiders that do all this and more: Programmatically download entire websites Effectively parse data from web pages Manage cookies Decode encrypted files Automate form submissions Send and receive email Send SMS alerts to your cell phone Unlock password-protected websites Automatically bid in online auctions Exchange data with FTP and NNTP servers
Sample projects using standard code libraries reinforce these new skills. You'll learn how to create your own webbots and spiders that track online prices, aggregate different data sources into a single web page, and archive the online data you just can't live without. You'll learn inside information from an experienced webbot developer on how and when to write stealthy webbots that mimic human behavior, tips for developing fault-tolerant designs, and various methods for launching and scheduling webbots. You'll also get advice on how to write webbots and spiders that respect website owner property rights, plus techniques for shielding websites from unwanted robots.
Some tasks are just too tedious--or too important!-- to leave to humans. Once you've automated your online life, you'll never let a browser limit the way you use the Internet again.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Great Basic Book December 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Need to learn how to browse the web with your own software instead of manually browsing? The is the best book on the subject. Written for people new to writing webbots, the example code is straightforward. A basic understanding of php is sufficient for understanding the examples.
Michael Schrenk takes you directly to the point of the book with fully explained examples. They are specific-use scripts, which makes them easy to learn from. With an understanding of the basics, you can combine and extend the sample projects to build larger multi-purpose webbots on your own. The example scripts can be tested against the authors' web site to ensure consistent results.
Most of the material naturally deals with browser emulation. In addition, there are chapters on POP3 mail servers interfaces, FTP webbots, and NNTP newsgroup interfaces.
This is a great basic book that will take you from curiosity to a working knowledge of webbot authoring in a short time period.
a super introduction to web spiders November 17, 2008
I won't re-iterate the excellent reviews already posted on this book, other than to say this is probably my favorite all-time programming book: excellently written, highly informative, and full of smarts. Plus, if you're not too aware of how powerful and useful web spiders can be, this is the book for you.
:-) bots August 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a great reference and/or introduction to the cURL library. After reading this book, I realized it is not intended as a single solution for bot programming. This book covers many features of cURL and should be in any bot programmers library. Also as mentioned here in the reviews, the regular expressions statement in the book is almost completely inaccurate.
Excellent Source July 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I can't say enough about this book. It's informative, laid out well, dynamic examples and has an awesome website tie-in. I would recommed this book to anyone interesting in learning how to scrape websites for data
Excellent cURL primer June 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book used as an introduction to the cURL library. The author has created a set of his own functions that are well written and, with the help of the book, easy to understand.
It does pre-suppose some PHP and data transfer protocol knowledge but if you are already armed with that, this is an excellent intro to data exchange across servers. Each chapter introduces a new concept and a simple usage of that concept. I seldom read tech related books cover to cover but this book was an exception. I have been programming for over 20 years so being excited by new stuff is somewhat rare. I enjoy new stuff but this book whets the imagination!
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