While I remember - spidering hacks

As I’m trying to write a bot/some bots for BritBlog I got an O’Reilly book called Spidering Hacks. It’s basically loads of perl examples (hacks), but covers a wide range of perl modules including LWP, WWW::Mechanize, HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML::TokeParser. Topics include spidering, scraping and data mining, and it’s actually pretty interesting. Perl isn’t one of the easiest languages to deal with when there are reams and reams of code, but the examples are all quite concise (thanks to the excellent perl modules available), and generally really easy to understand. I’ve been flicking through this book for a couple of weeks now, and it really is very good.

So if you fancy having a play at writing your own bots then I can recommend this as an excellent guide!