brace a more grounded and realistic goal: They'd like software programs to roam the Internet and gather data for them.
Mark Watson's book,
Programming Intelligent Agents for the Internet
, falls into the latter camp. It describes, in source-code-level detail, how to create C++ programs that can plumb the Net, gather data, and present a cogent summary to their master. The first several ch
apters describe how to wrap up the Winsock API in a C++ class so that it's easy to include in later projects. This class becomes the foundation for the rest of the book, which explores downloading, indexing, and parsing Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files from throughout the Net.
The final chapter shows how you can create your own customized newspaper using the tools developed earlier in the book. This system will revisit major Web sites of your choice, download the information, and reformat it for your screen. The code for accomplishing this is interlaced with text that describes the strategy at a high level. You can also grab the code directly from the disk that's bound into the book.
You should be ready and willing to read C++ code if you dig into this book. So, if you want to build and customize your own tools, it will give you many examples of how to structure your applications and code.
Peter Wayner is a BYTE consulting editor based in Baltimore, Maryland. His latest book is
Disappearing Cryptography: Being and Nothingness on the Net (Arcadia Press, 1996). His home page is at
http://access.digex.net/~pcw/pcpage.html
.
Book Review: Do What I Bid
