Book excerpts:

Web Client Programming with Perl shows you how to extend scripting skills to the Web. This book teaches you the basics of how browsers communicate with servers and how to write your own customized Web clients to automate common tasks. It is intended for those who are motivated to develop software that offers a more flexible and dynamic response than a standard Web browser.

Using this book, you'll learn how to automate repetitive queries on the Web, detect broken hyperlinks on your site and write simple "robots" that traverse hyperlinks across a site, and across the Web in general.

This book will be of interest to web administrators who need to automate repetitive tasks or reduce maintenance time, UNIX shell programmers who want to interface their scripts to the Web and commercial software developers and consultants who need reference material for technical Web specifications and proof-of-concept examples.

Most of the examples in this book use Perl, a versatile and portable language that is already familiar to many CGI programmers and UNIX power users. The book does not teach Perl, but the techniques used in the book should be easily followed by anyone with some programming background and can be adapted to whatever language you choose.