(Ebook) Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL by Michael Schrenk ISBN 9781593271206, 1593271204

(Ebook) Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL by Michael Schrenk ISBN 9781593271206, 1593271204

The power of this book is not so much in it's code examples but rather in it's ability to change your perspective. We are all aware that the Internet is a client-server topology, but what does that really mean? Reading the first few chapters gave me a whole new viewpoint of the Internet and what I could do with it, or to it. In the year since I first read it, I have stopped developing websites and now code web agents exclusively. It's amazing the number of uses they fulfill.The code in the book is basic, not fit for production (the author tells you this) but it is invaluable to teach the theory and fundamentals of CURL. If you use the code and the provided website to practice with, you will soon be able to develop your own code library. Scale is also left to you to figure out. The obvious first step is a database and a NAS. Start small and use this book for the invaluable reference it is.I really have to rate this book as one of my most influential reads of the last few years.