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Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP

By Quentin Zervaas

Want to assert yourself as a cutting–edge PHP web developer? Take a practical approach...

Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL

By Michael Schrenk

Media: Book (Paperback, 328 pages)
ISBN: 1593271204
Publisher: No Starch Press
Release Date: Mar 30, 2007

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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.

As a bonus, visit the author's website to test your webbots on sample target pages, and to download the scripts and code libraries used in the book.

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.

a super introduction to web spiders

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.

Submitted 17 Nov 2008

:-) bots

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.

Submitted 6 Aug 2008

Excellent Source

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

Submitted 28 Jul 2008

Excellent cURL primer

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!

Submitted 2 Jun 2008

barry naice!

This book is simply awesome. You will need to come armed with at least a basic knowledge of php, but everything is pretty straight forward. The projects are well explained and applicable to a wide range of projects that you might be getting yourself into.

Submitted 14 Jan 2008