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Perl & LWP

By Sean M. Burke
June 2002
Pages: 260
ISBN 10: 0-596-00178-9 | ISBN 13: 9780596001780
(Average of 1 Customer Reviews)

Book description

The LWP (Library for WWW in Perl) suite of modules lets your programs download and extract information from the Web. Perl & LWP shows how to make web requests, submit forms, and even provide authentication information, and it demonstrates using regular expressions, tokens, and trees to parse HTML.. This book is a must have for Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the Web.
Full Description

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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Cover | Table of Contents | Index | Sample Chapter | Colophon

Book details

First Edition: June 2002
ISBN: 0-596-00178-9
Pages: 260
Average Customer Reviews: (Based on 1 Reviews)

Featured customer reviews

Perl & LWP Review, December 09 2003

Rating:

Submitted by avirup [Respond | View]

Nice & concise book.

Only backdraw is that most of the examples in this book donot work.

(as websites used have either moved or have changed their format) .

It would have been helpful if the examples had run.

Avirup

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Media reviews

"The indispensable guide to learning LWP and using it effectively."
--Netsurfer Digest, Feb 14, 2003

"'Perl & LWP' is a solid, no-nonsense book that will teach you how to do screen-scraping using Perl...Excellent introduction to extracting and processing information from web sites...The book is well-written and to-the-point. It is structured in a way that mimics what a programmer new to the field would do: start from the docs for a module, play with it, write snippets of code that use the various functions of the module, then go on to coding real-life examples. I particularly liked the fact that the author often explains the whys, and not only the hows, of the various pieces of code he shows us...rating 9."
--mir, slashdot.org, August 19, 2002

"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

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