Perl & LWP and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more

Buy New

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime free trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn more
Buy Used
Used - Like New See details
Price: £15.10

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
or
Get a £1.55 Amazon.co.uk Gift Card
Perl & LWP
 
 
Start reading Perl & LWP on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Perl & LWP [Paperback]

Sean M. Burke
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £30.99
Price: £20.14 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £10.85 (35%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.
Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).
Want guaranteed delivery by Saturday, June 2? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £16.67  
Paperback £20.14  
Trade In this Item for up to £1.55
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Perl & LWP for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.55, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.

Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with Spidering Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools £19.54

Perl & LWP + Spidering Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
Price For Both: £39.68

Show availability and delivery details


Product details

  • Paperback: 262 pages
  • Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (27 Jun 2002)
  • Language French
  • ISBN-10: 0596001789
  • ISBN-13: 978-0596001780
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 18 x 1.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 789,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

More About the Author

Sean M. Burke
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Visit Amazon's Sean M. Burke Page

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Perl and LWP explains how to write programs that browse the Web, using the excellent Library for the World Wide Web or LWP. It is aimed at developers who already know both Perl and HTML, although you don't need to be an expert in either.

The fascination of this topic is that it makes you see the Web in a different way, not as a set of pages for users to browse, but as a huge database for your programs to explore. The most robust technique for querying Web sites programmatically is through XML Web Services, but this approach is in its infancy. LWP takes a different route, called screen-scraping. In essence, your Perl code pretends to be a browser and grabs HTML for processing. Using LWP you could write a command-line program to search your favourite auction site, fetch news headlines, or check multiple retail sites for the best prices. As the author acknowledges, the problem with screen-scraping is its brittleness: if the target Web site adopts a new look, it breaks your code. There are also interesting fair usage issues. Even so, it's a powerful technique with many possible applications. This clear and concise guide comes complete with typically terse Perl code examples. Topics include LWP basics, posting form data, processing results with regular expressions, using trees to process HTML, imitating different browser types, and supporting cookies programmatically. An appendix offers handy information like HTTP status codes, character tables, and MIME types. LWP is large, but while this title does not attempt to cover all the modules, it does provide all you need to start coding your own Web-mining programs.--Tim Anderson

MIR, slashdot.org, August 19, 2002

Solid, no-nonsense book that will teach you how to do screen-scraping using Perl.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Tag this product

 (What's this?)
Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items.
Your tags: Add your first tag
 

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Customer Reviews

4 star
0
3 star
0
2 star
0
1 star
0
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Fabulous book! 31 Aug 2002
Format:Paperback
This book is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to web automation. It reads as both a gentle tutorial and a well organized reference. Basic HTTP operation, regexp HTML parsing, tokenizing, cookie authentication, form handling, and robot spidering are covered extensively in numerous case studies and practical examples.

Naturally, I was impressed by the simple, consistent treatment of examples: inspect source and find the interesting bits, code things up and then enhance to suit. :-)

A particularly satisfying thing to me is the sane way of working, that the author assumes. So many people seem to just bungle their way through web programming while ignoring basics like the robots.txt file. This book helps to prevent this.

One would think that only a thick tome would be sufficient to cover such vast territory, but the author (who is an active LWP module developer) does a fabulous job covering this extensive subject matter.

I recommend this book both to anyone starting out on their way to working with the underside of the web and to accomplished professionals in need of a full reference manual.

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A satisfyingly short (242p) book that covers its subject perfectly. The examples are well written and explained and are ideal for using as a starting point for your own work. Within 15 minutes I had written a script to fetch pages of football results from a web site, process the data and produce files for uploading to my database. Previous I did this by downloading the html and editing it by hand - automating it will save me about 30 minutes a week.

Of course it's an O'Reilly title so the attractive layout, typography and attention to detail goes without saying. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to automate the extraction of data from the web - follow Sean's guidance and you'll be productive sooner than you thought possible.

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A satisfyingly short (242p) book that covers its subject perfectly. The examples are well written and explained and are ideal for using as a starting point for your own work. Within 15 minutes I had written a script to fetch pages of football results from a web site, process the data and produce files for uploading to my database. Previous I did this by downloading the html and editing it by hand - automating it will save me about 30 minutes a week.

Of course it's an O'Reilly title so the attractive layout, typography and attention to detail goes without saying. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to automate the extraction of data from the web - follow Sean's guidance and you'll be productive sooner than you thought possible.

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 

Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Look for similar items by subject


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges