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Perl & LWP [Paperback]

Sean M. Burke (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Publication Date: 27 Jun 2002 | ISBN-10: 0596001789 | ISBN-13: 978-0596001780 | Edition: 1

Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages.

The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, news to e-commerce, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate Web-based purchase orders as easily as you can set up a program to download MP3 files from a web site.

Perl & LWP covers:

  • Understanding LWP and its design
  • Fetching and analyzing URLs
  • Extracting information from HTML using regular expressions and tokens
  • Working with the structure of HTML documents using trees
  • Setting and inspecting HTTP headers and response codes
  • Managing cookies
  • Accessing information that requires authentication
  • Extracting links
  • Cooperating with proxy caches
  • Writing web spiders (also known as robots) in a safe fashion
Perl & LWP includes many step-by-step examples that show how to apply the various techniques. Programs to extract information from the web sites of BBC News, Altavista, ABEBooks.com, and the Weather Underground, to name just a few, are explained in detail, so that you understand how and why they work. Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the web can pick up this book and be immediately productive. Written by a contributor to LWP, and with a foreword by one of LWP's creators, Perl & LWP is the authoritative guide to this powerful and popular toolkit.

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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: 17.8 x 1.3 x 23.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 914,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon 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

Review

Salted with plenty of examples, the book covers the whole process of navigating HTTP, downloading content, and parsing it into something usable. -- Rick Wayne, Software Development, September 2002

Solid, no-nonsense book that will teach you how to do screen-scraping using Perl. -- MIR, slashdot.org, August 19, 2002

The indispensable guide to learning LWP and using it effectively. -- Netsurfer Digest, Feb 14, 2003
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous book! 31 Aug 2002
By Gene Boggs
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.

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Does exactly what it says on the tin! 11 Aug 2002
By "petebarlow"
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.

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Does exactly what it says on the tin 11 Aug 2002
By "petebarlow"
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.

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