Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Session Authentication

Unlike basic authentication, in which login credentials are sent each time a page is downloaded, session authentication validates users once and creates a session value that represents that authentication. The session values (instead of the actual username and password) are passed to each subsequent page fetch to indicate that the user is authenticated. There are two basic methods for employing session authentication—with cookies and with query strings. These methods are nearly identical in execution and work equally well. You’re apt to encounter both forms of sessions as you gain experience writing webbots.

Authentication with Cookie Sessions

Cookies are small pieces of information that servers store on your hard drive. Cookies ...