Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers, 2nd Edition

Acknowledgments

I want to extend a very special thank you to all the readers of the first edition of Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers. Since the book’s initial publication in 2007, you’ve come to my book signings, attended my talks at conferences, and sent me a steady stream of emails. At every venue, you’ve communicated your excitement about the webbot projects you’re working on, often through very well-considered questions. In fact, your involvement is the number one reason for this second edition and its coverage of new topics like:

• Advanced parsing techniques with regular expressions

• Improved webbot stealth through the use of proxies

• Scaling and mass deployment of webbots

• Scraping data from “difficult websites” that make heavy use of JavaScript ...