The Internet is bigger and better than what a mere browser allows. Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers is for programmers and businesspeople who want to take full advantage of the vast resources available on the Web. There's no reason to let browsers limit your online experience-especially when you can easily automate online tasks to suit your individual needs.

Learn how to write webbots and spiders that do all this and more:

• Programmatically download entire websites

• Effectively parse data from web pages

• Manage cookies

• Decode encrypted files

• Automate form submissions

• Send and receive email

• Send SMS alerts to your cell phone

• Unlock password-protected websites

• Automatically bid in online auctions

• Exchange data with FTP and NNTP servers

Sample projects using standard code libraries reinforce these new skills. You'll learn how to create your own webbots and spiders that track online prices, aggregate different data sources into a single web page, and archive the online data you just can't live without. You'll learn inside information from an experienced webbot developer on how and when to write stealthy webbots that mimic human behavior, tips for developing fault-tolerant designs, and various methods for launching and scheduling webbots. You'll also get advice on how to write webbots and spiders that respect website owner property rights, plus techniques for shielding websites from unwanted robots.

As a bonus, visit the author's website to test your webbots on sample target pages, and to download the scripts and code libraries used in the book.

Some tasks are just too tedious-or too important!- to leave to humans. Once you've automated your online life, you'll never let a browser limit the way you use the Internet again.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 15 Ratings

Great introduction - 2009-10-08
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great introduction on the subject. The supplied PHP library does all the work.

This book is useful - 2009-01-25
Reviewer Rating:
This book is not like very algorithmic, but you can know the basic of webbots writing and some techniques involved. curl is good for starters, but it is the ideas instead of the codes that help us understand the concept. What you need to do is not copying the code, but to study what it does and why things are implemented.

Good book. 5/5

Great Basic Book - 2008-12-02
Reviewer Rating:
Need to learn how to browse the web with your own software instead of manually browsing? The is the best book on the subject. Written for people new to writing webbots, the example code is straightforward. A basic understanding of php is sufficient for understanding the examples.

Michael Schrenk takes you directly to the point of the book with fully explained examples. They are specific-use scripts, which makes them easy to learn from. With an understanding of the basics, you can combine and extend the sample projects to build larger multi-purpose webbots on your own. The example scripts can be tested against the authors' web site to ensure consistent results.

Most of the material naturally deals with browser emulation. In addition, there are chapters on POP3 mail servers interfaces, FTP webbots, and NNTP newsgroup interfaces.

This is a great basic book that will take you from curiosity to a working knowledge of webbot authoring in a short time period.

a super introduction to web spiders - 2008-11-17
Reviewer Rating:
I won't re-iterate the excellent reviews already posted on this book, other than to say this is probably my favorite all-time programming book: excellently written, highly informative, and full of smarts. Plus, if you're not too aware of how powerful and useful web spiders can be, this is the book for you.

:-) bots - 2008-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a great reference and/or introduction to the cURL library. After reading this book, I realized it is not intended as a single solution for bot programming. This book covers many features of cURL and should be in any bot programmers library. Also as mentioned here in the reviews, the regular expressions statement in the book is almost completely inaccurate.