Some Books

I got my courage up Saturday and ordered the books from O'Reilly. This press has long been highly regarded by technologists, whether they are programmers, IT professionals, or just geeks. Go ahead - ask a geek if he/she has a camel book, and chances are they'll know what you're talking about (and it will be within reach). Don't tell them what it is if they don't know.

I'm posting this to chronicle my efforts to build a web crawler and eventually a search engine. I expect to make further posts about how this project develops, and perhaps what I've found in these books that helped.

I have ordered three books. I went there for one, but there's always a deal to get three for the price of two, plus free shipping. And I can always find another book to get. So:

Perl & LWP. This one I've borrowed before, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of automated web surfing using Perl. I built a small script one time that looked up my SMTP server's IP at spamcop, then e-mailed me if my mail server was ever blacklisted. It was fun and quite easy, but since I can't find that script right now I'll have to post it later.

Spidering Hacks. I ordered this one for obvious reasons. This book's excerpts is where I found that little bit on needing my spider registered. I expect to learn a lot and become very frustrated with what I find here.

Perl Cookbook. This was the third choice because I needed three. Also because it's $50 and I could use the discount. There apparently is a series of "cookbooks" that have really cool stuff (recipes) in them. There is also the PHP Cookbook, the C# 3.0 Cookbook, and more. I expect to find shortcuts and things I'd never thought of in this book.