August 2003
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 33m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Accessing Community Features
Amazon of course provides access to all of their community features through their web site. As more and more sites integrate closely with Amazon, though, there is more demand to tap into the community via code.
Accessing Through Web Services
The Web Services API (see Chapter 6) offers some access. When accessing an individual product’s information through the API, you can find the following community data:
The three latest reviews
ASINs of five related items
Three lists that contain the item
This is fantastic information to have access to. Developers are building tools that work with this data in many creative ways. But when compared with the volume of information that’s available on Amazon’s site, the community information in the API is only a small window into the larger community. That leaves one route for integration-minded developers: screen scraping.
Accessing Through Screen Scraping
The term screen scraping refers to requesting a web page programmatically with a script, and picking through the resulting HTML for the interesting data. Finding the data itself involves writing complex regular expressions . Regular expressions are a pattern-matching syntax that can become complicated quickly. For example, here’s a regular expression that extracts a list of books from a purchase circle page [Hack #44]:
<td.*?<b><a.*?-/(.*?)/.*?>(.*?)</a></b>.*?by (.*?)<br>.*?</td>
You can see some HTML there, and the expressions are based on where the data is within the HTML ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.