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Content by Paul M. Reinheimer
Commentateur n° : 29,644
Votes Utiles:
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Reviews Written by
Paul M. Reinheimer "Author" (Montréal, Quebec, Canada)
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Reviewer Rank:
29644 |
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Good basic intro, with a catch, April 27 2007
I picked up this book full of enthusiasm, spiders are just plain cool, they go out and start downloading data for you, reading webpages, and even understanding them a little. My enthusiasm was dashed a little however on page four: You may use any of the scripts in this book for your own personal use, as long as you agree not to redistribute them... and agree not to sell or create derivative products under any circumstances.. I develop in PHP professionally, and a lot of the code I write ends up getting used somewhere with some sort of a for-profit basis, which pretty effectively prevents me from using any code between the covers (at its strictest reading, Im not sure I can even change the code).
The book does a great job of introducing different sorts of web agents that you can create programatically (more than just spiders) and introduces all sorts of interesting projects along those lines. Throughout the book a series of libraries written by the author are leveraged to make the retrieval and parsing of the various pages much easier. While newer developers will enjoy being able to concentrate on the big picture I found myself itching for more information on the nitty gritty.
Some of the projects explored include: price monitoring, image capturing (want to be your own google image search? :) ), link verification, spiders, and snipers. Each of the different projects received its own chapter, and effectively covered a lot of the topics covered within.
Overall, I would recommend this book to beginner to intermediate PHP developers looking to tackle the world of web agents, its a good primer on the related topics, and at the very least will give you some ideas on the complexities involved. As their skill grows they will probably find them-self either moving past the libraries included with the book, or modifying them greatly. My biggest complaint is the lack of coverage on the robots.txt file, some talk is given to it in terms of blocking robots from your own site, but I didnt see any code that actually dealt with parsing it for your own robot.
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Great headset for whatever you're doing, Jan 15 2006
I picked up this headset in preparation to teach an on-line course. I've used several headsets before, and still have a few kicking around, but wanted something with better sound & recording quality since I'm going to be using them professionally. The thicker foam surrounding the mic is particularly appreciated, I doubt my class wants to listen to me breathe for three hours. I've been very happy with the set, the sound quality from the headphones is great, I'd put them up against anything else I own. The quality of the mic is reported to be excellent by my students and associates. I find the foam padding around the ear pieces quite nice, it keeps my ears a reasonable temperature even during prolonged use, unlike some other units I own (noise canceling ones in particular). The cord is 2.9M long, which easily allows it to reach under my desk to the back of my PC while still allowing me freedom of movement. For most of the cheaper sets i've owned this was a big problem. The mic & headphone jack cords are attached untill about a foot before the cords terminate, this is convenient if you are planning on plugging them both into the back of your computer, however if you have another setup (say you wish to plug the headphone portion into your speakers, and the mic into your PC directly) you could have a problem.
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