Perl & LWP
By Sean M. Burke
June 2002
Pages: 260
ISBN 10: 0-596-00178-9 |
ISBN 13: 9780596001780
(4) (Average of 2 Customer Reviews)
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
- 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
Register your book | Submit Errata | Examples
Browse within this book
| Table of Contents | Index | Sample Chapter | Colophon
Book details
First Edition: June 2002
ISBN: 0-596-00178-9
Pages: 260
Average Customer Reviews: (4) (Based on 2 Reviews)
Featured customer reviews
Top marks for a useful book, March 15 2009
To date, I haven't had much need to pull data from web pages, so I set up a simple interactive telnet session in Perl to grab what I needed. Not elegant, but it worked. Unfortunately, it was rather hit and miss, mostly because I didn't understand the protocol as well as I should have.
Enter "Perl & LWP," a book describing the "Library for WWW in Perl." Not only did the book have the expected "here's how the library works," but also an explanation of the HTTP protocol as it applies to what you are doing (or trying to do). This is particularly good for people like me who will learn the minimum necessary to get a job done, and revisit things later to learn more thoroughly, so I improve on what I've already done, an also to be able to apply what I've learned elsewhere. Some useful utilites were also provided.
Top marks for a useful book - script your way through static and dynamic web sites, deal with cookies, proxy caches, and authentication. The web was intended to be interactive, and the author shows us how to scriptify it.
Reviewed by ELUG (http://elug.ca/reviews/perl_and_lwp.shtml)
Perl & LWP Review, December 09 2003
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
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
