[kw-pm] Notes from June meeting

[Daniel R. Allen]

These are not comprehensive, just URLs and things for wrapup that I was
thinking about today.

Notes from KW.pm June Meeting

- discussed YAPC::Canada talks, the Matrix, perl on Microsoft
  (activestate), perl as a teaching language.

- browse and d/l the proceedings CD at:
  http://coder.com/yapc-canada/2003/proceedings/

- Presentation on "screen-scraping" and automating web-client tasks.
  Sorry, no slides!

  - LWP / libwww : library for "writing WWW clients", or more common
    subset of that, retrieving WWW content (LWP::Simple). find it on CPAN.

  - Note- we also have the book "LWP and Perl" in our Library! Ask
    to borrow it and it's yours.  For a month or two, at least.

  - HTML::TokeParser : parse HTML, simply. Using a parser is much easier
    than trying to hand-roll regular expressions.  Also on CPAN.

  - WWW::Mechanize : good tool for general screen-scraping. Basically
    a shell around a number of underlying modules, such as HTML::Form,
    LWP::Agent, HTTP::Response.  But provides a nice consistant
    front-end.  Easy to use. Ditto, CPAN.

  - WWW::Mechanize::Shell : Question from Tomas about building the
    screen-scraping code according to an interactive session on a
    website.  Lo, and behold, there's a module for it. Guess where.

  - While we discussed the philosophy of learning programming, I
    installed WWW::Mechanize::Shell.  It needs a buttload of other
    modules, but once they're installed, it does nearly what Tomas
    was asking for.

  - Didn't get to legal issues around copying data from peoples' sites.
    Basically: if there are terms of use, read them and follow them.
    If you run a site, have easy-to-read terms of use.  Anything else?

  - Next month: mod_perl talk!


Happy... er, Harry Potter Day...
-Daniel

http://coder.com/ - Prescient Code Solutions - (519) 575-3733 da at coder.com