Web Client Programming with Perl

Web Client Programming with Perl Automating Tasks on the Web

By Clinton Wong
First Edition January 1900
Pages: 228
ISBN 10: 1-56592-214-X | ISBN 13: 9781565922143
(Average of 0 Customer Reviews)

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Book description

Web Client Programming with Perl shows you how to extend scripting skills to the Web. This book teaches you the basics of how browsers communicate with servers and how to write your own customized Web clients to automate common tasks. It is intended for those who are motivated to develop software that offers a more flexible and dynamic response than a standard Web browser.
Full Description

On the World Wide Web, people are accustomed to using graphical browsers such as Netscape Navigator or Mosaic as their only interface for visiting remote sites, accessing up-to-date documents, and filling out forms. But graphical browsers can be limiting: the very interactivity that makes them so intuitive to use also makes them clumsy for automating tasks. If you want to get the latest weather report every few hours, track a Federal Express package online, or use a dictionary server repeatedly throughout the day, using your browser to perform the same task over and over can become cumbersome. As with any repetitive task, these applications are best done by writing a script. Web Client Programming with Perl shows you how to extend scripting skills to the Web. This book teaches you the basics of how browsers communicate with servers and how to write your own customized Web clients to automate common tasks. It is intended for those who are motivated to develop software that offers a more flexible and dynamic response than a standard Web browser. Using this book, you'll learn how to:

Automate repetitive queries on the Web
Detect broken hyperlinks on your site
Write simple "robots" that traverse hyperlinks across a site, and across the Web in general

This book will be of interest to:

Web administrators who need to automate repetitive tasks or reduce maintenance time
UNIX shell programmers who want to interface their scripts to the Web
Commercial software developers and consultants who need reference material for technical Web specifications and proof-of-concept examples

Most of the examples in this book use Perl, a versatile and portable language that is already familiar to many CGI programmers and UNIX power users. The book does not teach Perl, but the techniques used in the book should be easily followed by anyone with some programming background and can be adapted to whatever language you choose.

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Cover | Table of Contents | Index | Online Book | Colophon

Featured customer reviews

Web Client Programming with Perl Review, January 08 1999
Submitted by Marco Bours [Respond | View]

Typo on Page 196 and 197

su sudanese should read su sundanese
te tegulu should read te telugu

compaire http://dutlls1.lr.tudelft.nl/support/teTeX/latex/base/begleit.err

Web Client Programming with Perl Review, April 25 1998
Submitted by Eric Weiss [Respond | View]

The book is very helpful if you need to setup a Perl
script to access a web site. It will get you going with
the issue of using sockets to communicate and using http
to send requests. There is also an example of a script
to check a web site for broken links.

I am not an expert on sockets, but I have found that even
with Perl, there are likely to be problems on various
platforms. There is only one brief mention which suggests
that this book is not very applicable to Wintel programming
because LWP (Library for WWW access in Perl) is not
available. I think it now is available. Can we have a
web update on this? Are there ways around this?
Can the examples be run on various flavors of Unix such
as SRV, BSD and Linux? What happens to various examples
when the server turns out to be a non-Unix box?

The examples could be translated into other languages
such as Java and C/C++ with varying amounts of difficulty
depending on what you wanted to do with sockets and
regular expressions. A brief discussion of this could
help broaden the appeal of this book.

It would be helpful if O'Reilly would publish the examples
for downloading and add an errata file such as a previous
reader commented. Other O'Reilly books have these files.
Actually, there is an examples file at
ftp://ftp.ora.com/published/oreilly/nutshell/web-client/
but it is not available or mentioned on the O'Reilly web
pages.

One bug: A Perl subroutine/function is correctly written
in an example as (say) "getopts('hHrd');" but in the text
is called "Getopts()". The difference between g and G is
significant.

Overall, despite these minor complaints, the book saved me
a lot of time which saved a project for a client.

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Media reviews "I admit it, I did not pay enough attention to the title. I assumed this had something to do with forms or other Web *server* programming. But the title is correct: this book teaches you how to write *clients* for the Web. "What, program your own browser? Well, maybe. What the author concentrates on, though, is development of small, specialty utilities. Why fire up a browser, and navigate menus and screens, when what you really want is simple confirmation of package delivery? You don't actually want to read http://www.av.ibm.com/Update.html everyday -- only when a new version comes out and the page changes. Or, perhaps, you are simply obsessive and want to check AltaVista every morning to see if anyone has put up a Web page about you overnight. All of this is much simpler and quicker with a utility than a full browser. (Besides, a utility can work in the background.) "After an introduction, chapters two and three cover HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). In and of itself, this is worth the book, since so few HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and even CGI (Common Gateway Interface) texts do a decent job of it. Wong then goes on to cover sockets programming aspects of Perl and the LWP (Library for WWW access in Perl). Chapter six has sample LWP programs, while seven shows graphical interfaces with Tk. Appendices list HTTP headers, reference tables, and the Robot Exclusion Standard. "Overall, a useful book in many ways, and readable as well. The book may be of particular interest to those dealing with intranet application development." --copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997 BKWBCLPR.RVW 970507

"Automating access to the Web is actually an interesting problem. As far as you need to recursively follow hyperlinks or periodically check a Web server or retrieve a significant amount of files from http servers you are faced with the problem of automation. If so this book is in fact a good choice. It consequently treats all the related subjects in a forthright and intelligent manner.

"Introductions are followed by further detalization and examples. The book contains description of hhtp, introduction to programming network applications with Berkeley sockets, many useful examples of Perl programming. This book is not for a totally novice users. It assumes you are somehow familiar with the concept of client/server network applications and TCP/IP and that you know what Internet is, what it is for and how to access it. It also does not give any preliminary hints on how to write an application in Perl. Perl was chosen as the language for examples because it's relatively easy, powerful, useful, common and modern approach to write automated data-processing scripts.

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