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The book consists of six chapter and 400 pages written by
more then 24 authors from all corners of the world. There are 100 examples
of spider application covering very wide area of application. All of them
are done with Perl tool called LWD (Active version of Pearl). The software
used is available on all platforms ranging from PCs, Macs, and UNIX
platforms. First two chapters are devoted to their installation and where to
get them. In chapter 3 coverage is given to use of the LWD and its options,
as well as parsing tools for HTM and XML Rest of the chapters cover real
world examples. These include following, and in most cases they include
getting info about the item (like in case of MP3 file, song name, artist and
so on) as well as content. The list includes following; movies, MP3s, WEB
Cams, news, UseNet files, yahoo groups, yahoo and Google index files, Amazon
advertising and specials files, Alexa product ratings, music databases,
daily horoscopes, Online Graphic plotting tools, RRD tool, Stock quotes,
author search, library of congress book database, FedEx package tracking,
RDD (feed line aggregator reader),Web Site index database, TV listings,
Weather, Trend spotting in retail markets, in Google and Directi, train
schedules, Geo Distances between two points, online thesaurus and dictionary
lookup, bug tracking reports, and shopping for best prices on games. Also it
includes examples of fancy file downloading of XML and HTTP formats using
Curl, and Wget freeware tools.
There are also examples how to use multiple search engines
for WEB searches, and use of PHP. There is a miscellaneous chapter which
includes some trivia stuff among them; Robot Karaoke, better business bureau
Data access, health inspection data access, and filtering of various
content. In chapter five there is some coverage of useful utilities among
them; Cron, Wget, rsync, using Google API for graphics. There are also
examples of accessing Google databases, and other search engines. There is
some info on sending mailing lists to instant messenger interfaces.
The book sells for $25.00 it well written with 100
examples in six chapters, good buy for Spidering 101 and for advance Perl
programming using LWD tool. It will become one of the O’Reilly classics on
this area. Only thing that may slow it down security measures on firewalls.
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