Rating: 
Summary: A must-read for exploiting the web in a GOOD way.
Review: A great book for anyone who wishes to automate daily tasks on the web. Sean does an outstanding job of showing how Perl can be used to extract and manipulate not just data but useful information efficiently from the web's vast data resources. I've already adapted an example from this book (link-checking spider) for sites I maintain. Yes, I've known of the LWP module prior to this book. But as a lazy programmer, I rely on others to show me the way. Sean does just that...
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for exploiting the web in a GOOD way.
Review: A great book for anyone who wishes to automate daily tasks on the web. Sean does an outstanding job of showing how Perl can be used to extract and manipulate not just data but useful information efficiently from the web's vast data resources. I've already adapted an example from this book (link-checking spider) for sites I maintain. Yes, I've known of the LWP module prior to this book. But as a lazy programmer, I rely on others to show me the way. Sean does just that...
Rating:
Summary: Very Informative and useful
Review: As a web programmer, I had dealt with several such projects dealing with web automation and writing simple crawlers even before I read "Perl & LWP". The book was the first book I've read on the subject, and I'm by no means disappointed. The book is very well organized, very informative and nails the subject in the head. I am pleased. I noticed some inaccuracies in the discussions, some chopped off paragraphs and sentences. But this doesn't affect the usability of the book much. Author Sean Burke does a great job in walking one through the most of the aspects of web automation and data extraction in the web using Perl and LWP (libwww in Perl ). The codes the book gives are very well organized, well written and easily debugable. The steps are pretty consistent across all the examples:
a) Inspect the HTML source code of the page;
b) Determine the tokens and patterns of interest;
c) Write the first code;
d) Fine tune the code; As usual, I'll be commenting on individual chapters to give you an idea of the
coverage of the book in more details...
Rating:
Summary: Exploit the web with power and ease
Review: Disclaimer: The author is an online-type-friend and I used to work with the author of the foreword. I even got my copy for free. If the above hasn't totally disqualified me from commenting, I just wanted to note some things most reviewers have ignored. The book is an excellent resource for two kinds of people. Many people scan technical books looking for little scripts and thingies; a few lines changed and BOOM! They have the program they always wanted. Sean provides those in abundance. It is also a good resource for a complete novice to learn about the hodgepodge of technologies we call the web - the ... wire protocol, markup languages, tree-based parsers, and encodings, to name just a few. The author is an expert in all of these, but has restrained himself to provide just enough information to get a programmer going. I was impressed time and again with how he manages to give the reader exactly enough knowledge to get their tasks done, with short but accurate explanations and pointers on where to learn more. Best of all, this is a funny technical book. Usually if a technical book has pretensions to humor, it jabs you in the arm repeatedly with lots of groaner puns and dumb cartoons, in order to fill the space between bland code sections. But Sean has sprinkled the *code sections* with his dada sense of humor, which also highlights the difference between mere placeholder data and the concept being illustrated. And then the text gets right back to the point. This is a slim work (242 pages, no thicker than my thumb) but packs a lot of value for your money. So buy it already. My only criticism is that it is exclusively focused on consuming services on the web - like downloading TV listings and so on. But you can use everything Sean talks about to also *publish* information; for instance, making some nifty Perl-based thing to update your online journal from MS Word or something. Or to aggregate information that's out there, and feed it back onto the web. Nevertheless, if you've got half a brain it will be obvious how to do this stuff once you've absorbed everything you'll get from this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible, bug-infested book...
Review: I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....
Rating:
Summary: Terrible, bug-infested book...
Review: I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....
Rating:
Summary: Excellent coverage of LWP, packed full of useful examples
Review: I was definitely interested when I first heard that O'Reilly were publishing a book on LWP. LWP is a definitive collection of perl modules covering everything you could think of doing with URIs, HTML, and HTTP. While 'web services' are the buzzword friendly technology of the day, sometimes you need to roll your sleeves up and get a bit dirty scraping screens and hacking at HTML. For such a deep subject, this book weighs in at a slim 242 pages. This is a very good thing. I'm far too busy to read these massive shelf-destroying tomes that seem to be churned out recently. It covers everything you need to know with concise examples, which is what makes this book really shine. You start with the basics using LWP::Simple through to more advanced topics using LWP::UserAgent, HTTP::Cookies, and WWW::RobotRules. Sean shows finger saving tips and shortcuts that take you more than a couple notches above what you can learn from the lwpcook manpage, with enough depth to satisfy somebody who is an experienced LWP hacker.
This book is a great reference, just flick through and you'll find a relevant chapter with an example to save the day. Chapters include filling in forms and extracting data from HTML using regular expressions, then more advanced topics using HTML::TokeParser, and then my preferred tool, the author's own HTML::TreeBuilder. The book ends with a chapter on spidering, with excellent coverage of design and warnings to get your started on your web trawling.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book. To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects. Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book. To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects. Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.
Rating:
Summary: This book can teach you expert-level web scraping/munging.
Review: If you aren't yet comfortable using object-oriented Perl modules, the multitude of examples will at least allow you see how it's done even if you're a bit fuzzy on what's happening 'underneath' when you call object methods. If you're comfortable learning how to do something without knowing exactly why it works, then the author's clear step-by-step explantions and numerous progressively more powerful examples should make this book accessible even to relatively innexperienced Perl programmers. More experienced programmers will understand better why things work, but any Perl programmer will set this book down feeling empowered to turn the web into their own valet. No longer do you need to check multiple sites looking for interesting information. Instead, you can readily author code to do that for you and alert you when items of interest are found. You can use these tools to free up personal time, to harvest information to inform business decisions, to automate tedious web application testing, and a zillion other things. The author's clear exploration of the relevant Perl modules leaves the reader with a good depth of understanding of what these modules do, when you might want to use which module, and how to use them for real world tasks. Before reading the book, I knew of these modules, but they were a rather intimidating pile. I'd used a few of them on occasion for rather limited projects, but was reluctant to invest the time required to read all of the documentation from the whole collection. Mountains of method-level documentation do not a tutorial make. This book takes all of that information, selects the most important parts, and ensures that those parts are covered in progressively more powerful and/or flexible examples. If you know Perl and you're sick of 'working the web' to get information and you want the web to work for you instead, then you need this book. I had a personal project that was on the back burner for a couple of years because it just sounded too hard. The weekend after I finished this book, I wrote what I had previously thought to be the hard part of that project and it was both easy and fun. This book makes hard things not just possible, but actually easy. -matt
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