Charlie Wilson's War was a publishing sensation and a New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times bestseller. In the early 1980s, a Houston socialite turned the attention of maverick Texas congressman Charlie Wilson to the ragged band of Afghan "freedom fighters" who continued, despite overwhelming odds, to fight the Soviet invaders. Wilson, who sat on the all-powerful House Appropriations Committee, managed to procure hundreds of millions of dollars to support the mujahideen. The arms were secretly procured and distributed with the help of an out-of-favor CIA operative, Gust Avrokotos, whose working-class Greek-American background made him an anomaly among the Ivy League world of American spies. Avrakotos handpicked a staff of CIA outcasts to run his operation and, with their help, continually stretched the Agency's rules to the breaking point. Moving from the back rooms of the Capitol, to secret chambers at Langley, to arms-dealers' conventions, to the Khyber Pass, this book presents an astonishing chapter of our recent past, and the key to understanding what helped trigger the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and ultimately led to the emergence of a brand-new foe in the form of radical Islam.
As a Spanish teacher, I have recommended The Spy Wore Red to my high school students for years. Several students who later spent their college junior year in Spain have come back to tell me how much this book meant to them and how much more they appreciated it following their sojourn there. They could catch glimpses of the old Spain in the new, simply because they had read this thriller.
World War II began as the Spanish Civil War ended(1936-1939), so Aline Griffiths arrived as huge social changes were about to occur in Spain. This book provides a superb peek into the "old" Spain, the Spain of high romance and extraordinarily traditional, now-antiquated values. Yet it is described in context of a delightfully novel-like autobiographical tale. Although it reads better than most spy fiction, one can take notes on Spanish culture on virtually every page. It is engrossing, culture-rich, and shows a young American girl from Pearl River, New York, doing the kinds of things of which only a grownup Nancy Drew type might have dreamed.
Exchange data with FTP and NNTP servers
Sample projects using standard code libraries reinforce these new skills. You'll learn how to create your own webbots and spiders that track online prices, aggregate different data sources into a single web page, and archive the online data you just can't live without. You'll learn inside information from an experienced webbot developer on how and when to write stealthy webbots that mimic human behavior, tips for developing fault-tolerant designs, and various methods for launching and scheduling webbots. You'll also get advice on how to write webbots and spiders that respect website owner property rights, plus techniques for shielding websites from unwanted robots.
As a bonus, visit the author's website to test your webbots on sample target pages, and to download the scripts and code libraries used in the book.
Some tasks are just too tedious-or too important!- to leave to humans. Once you've automated your online life, you'll never let a browser limit the way you use the Internet again.
Customer Reviews:
Must buy for any Webbot programmer.......2007-10-17
great book. very well organized and code in book is available for download and code is well documented
Great Book with Lots of Information.......2007-08-25
This book covers every aspect I could ever hope a book on web bots would cover. It goes into great detail and provides lots of background information about things such as why you should use web bots, security issues, how to authenticate a bot with password protected sites, writing search engine crawlers, parsing HTML, how to handle cookies, HTTP headers, dealing with forms and a lot more.
I was very pleased with how this book covered concepts. The book uses PHP and the cURL library as a teaching tool instead of trying to give a lesson in how to use PHP as a crawler language. The way the code is explained makes it very easy to translate into whatever language you are most comfortable coding in. The book uses fundamental functional programming concepts which make it easy to pick up the general idea without actually knowing PHP.
My boss bought this book to help my group us with a project we were working on, and even my co-workers who had no background with PHP were able to use this book to write a web bot in C# (using the cURL library) very easily. The concepts from this book easily transfered over to object-oriented concepts.
Scour The Internet = FUN FUN FUN.......2007-07-04
'Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL' by Michael Schrenk is an absolute GEM of a book for all internet computer nerds that love trying new things and hacking for a hobby!! If you are one of the afformentioned and love to try new things and see how you can scour the internet with the greatest of ease, you owe it yourself to read and DO this guide!! When I say DO I mean don't just read, but input the examples you'll find within and play around with the power of PHP and CURL to be able to quickly and efficiently traverse the web, not for the purpose of mayhem but enjoyment!
A perfect example contained within this book is writing code to programmatically download entire websites. Instead of just right-clicking an image, imagine running code to grab the ENTIRE contents simply and easily?!?
Other fun tasks you'll learn how to do are send SMS alers to your cell phone, decode encrypted files, parse web site data... the list could go on and on!!
If you like to play with the web and create cool apps that will do cool things, pick up this wonderful book, sick back and PLAY!!
***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
It's a top pick any comprehensive computer library needs........2007-06-17
Programmers and businesspeople who want to use the Web's resources to make the most of locating or promoting data will find Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers a key to successful use of the web. From how to decode encrypted files and automate form submissions to unlocking password-protected websites and placing automatic bids on web auction sites, this comes from a developer who has developed webbots and spiders for clients across North America, and who has all the insider keys to usage. It's a top pick any comprehensive computer library needs.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Etra-Ordinary.......2007-06-14
This is the sort of book I've been waiting for. The book is divided in many small, easy to follow chapters.
After reading it, you should be left with the knowledge and real-life PHP codes to help you take PHP to the extremes and go beyond your current use of PHP.
The only complaint I can make about the book is that the codes are written in procedural programming. In light of the much improved Object Oriented capabilities of PHP5 (and soon PHP6) this practice need to be reassessed.
I hope the later revisions of this book uses an OBJECT ORIENTED Approach. Sooner or later we should jump on the OO bandwagon.
I am sure anyone who have started on the OOP path, will find more and more uses for it
Book Description
From the bestselling author of A Man Called Intrepid comes the first and only biography of Vera Atkins, of whom James Bond creator Ian Fleming said, "In the real world of spies, Vera Atkins was the boss." Vera Atkins was an attractive young woman with smoky eyes and lustrous black hair. She belonged to a wealthy family and dined with ambassadors and kings. She could have been a socialite, but in the cataclysmic days of World War II, Vera Atkins became Great Britain's spymistress.
Customer Reviews:
Publishing farce.......2007-09-19
The author of Spymistress states that Vera Atkins had "lustrous black hair" whereas in fact she was a blue-eyed blonde, as anyone who ever met her could have told him.
If the author cannot get the colour of his subject's hair right it is hardly surprising that much of the rest of the book turns out to be nonsense too. The fantasies woven here have no interest. The author trivialises a great woman's life story. He does so in the knowledge that the dead cannot answer back.
The true story of Vera Atkins's life is far more compelling than anything in this book. I know this because I spent five years researching her extraordinary story across the world. I interviewed her at length before she died and I had sole access to her archive.
I am writing this review not to promote my own book but to defend Vera's integrity. This false "biography" desecrates the memory of a remarkable woman, misses the real story entirely, and brings the American publishing industry into disrepute. In short, it is a publishing farce.
Customer Reviews:
Critical Reading for those who care about the US in 2004.......2004-05-31
For a thinking person, the revelations in this book should spawn probing questions about the Mossad's part in geopolitics from pre-9-11 to 2004. Ostrovsky outlines how the Mossad, unlike any other secret intelligence service in the world, uses the vast Diaspora as "assets" to do their bidding. It is organized so that the Diaspora (over 50,000 strong) become temporary Mossad agents on an as-needed basis.
This structure accomplishes two things:
(1) By playing on the 'help the homeland' aspect of requesting help for Israel from the Diaspora through whatever the 'asset's' position or job skill can produce, it naturally compartmentalizes the significance of a job, and reduces costs. The Mossad has only 1200 agents worldwide, but calls on the considerable PR skills of the B'nai B'rith, JDL, and ADL to advance its aims on an as-needed basis. Ostrovsky shows in event after event how this is by design.
(2) The Mossad can get away with meddling in the politics of foreign countries by labeling as "anti-semitic" any objection to its methods; or similarly, by labeling as "anti-semitic" any objections if its gets caught. Again, Ostrovsky shows in example after example how this is by design.
The recent 2004 scandal in New Zealand is a case in point. This involved Mossad agents caught stealing New Zealand passports from paraplegics. Or the more disturbing US-based AP reports from Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida in the last five weeks in which Israeli agents were caught near nuclear sub and fuel stations, or trying to enter federal installations. The only reporter willing to follow up these stories is Daniel Hopsicker, a respected journalist, of online MadCowProd News. When you realize that these agents caused an entire Navy Sub station with nuclear missles to close down (May 20, 2004) because sniffing dogs discovered bomb material in their moving trucks, it makes Ostrovsky's detailed warning about what the Mossad is doing in the US all the more alarming.
I think the information I found the most distressing was how the Mossad uses US national print and broadcast media and reporters as assets. This a propaganda machine that at this time can only lead to more US sons and daughters coming home from Iraq in body bags. I say this because Ostrovsky is adamant in this book, published in 1993 or 1994, that it has been the Mossad's express policy for years to get the US into war with Iraq.
EXCELLENT BOOK.......2004-05-28
This is an excellent book, probably one of the best ones I have ever read. In my opinion it says the real story about israeli intelligence, how they think, how they act, and how dirty they play with everybody, even with people who have helped them. You MUST read this book.
Would Anyone Care to Hunt Dragons?.......2004-04-24
Without becoming one, that is.
Alongside the author's previous "By Way of Deception." This book, also a best seller, contains a depressing and chilling expose of The Mossad, Israel's intelligence service.
Unlike any other 'true espionage account' you might have hitherto read it is, as the saying goes, impossible to put down. Absolutely riveting. Though by the end the question is not 'Who are the good guys?' It's more like ' Who in The Middle East is NOT completely insane ? '
Ostrovsky was a former colonel in the Israeli armed forces before he joined Mossad. No one contends that he was a field officer, well connected and in the know. He was fired after a fracas in Cyprus, in which he contends he was forced to take the fall for his incompetent superiors. This would never have happenned in the Israeli Defense Forces, not without a proper hearing. However The Mossad, as he never tires of telling us, is a law unto itself.
According to the author it has become a 'rival state' comprised of good ole boys answerable only to the Prime Minister--at least in theory. In fact, it answers to no one.
Dissatisfied intelligence officers who have been, rightly or wrongly, given the boot writing scathing memoirs is not news.
However if, say, a CIA operative turned 'liberal' upon termination of employment alleged ONE TENTH of what Ostrovsky alleges, the scandal that would follow dwarf Watergate and Iran/Contra combined.
Among a few:
* The Mossad regards anyone in Israel who believes in peace with the Palestinians, or withdrawal from the occupied territories as little better than a traitor. It has sold arms and provided information to fundamentalist extremist Muslim groups via third parties in order to undermine the stability of Arab States and the credibility of their leaders with The West. Anything to keep the conflict burning.
* The Mossad planned to assasinate president George Bush Sr at the Madrid peace talks in 1991, due to his policy of pressuring Israel to the negotiaing table by freezing their loan guarantees.
A special Kidon (bayonet, i.e; hit men) unit took three Palestinian extremists from Beirut and set them up. The Mossad was to kill the 'perpretators' in the ensuing confusion after they had shot the president. Due to inside info Ostrovsky obtained, he was able to blow the whistle and the plan was cancelled--as were the three Palestinians, at the Nes Ziyyona facitlity, an ABC (atomic, bacteriological, chemical) warfare lab where the author contends top epidemiogical scientists routinely use enemies as human guinea pigs.
* The Mossad, did indeed murder their billionare operative Robert Maxwell, let Jonathan Pollard hang out to dry, and (ready?) assasinated Israeli general Yekutiel Adam a.k.a. "Kuti" because he had been appointed its head and they didn't want an 'outsider' taking over.
Now if all this---and much more---sound like the ravings of a lunatic, he's an extremely meticulous and detailed one.
Still, one wonders if the Mossad is a loose cannon, why Ostrovsky chose to trust anyone in it, after fleeing Israel.
He tells us that after getting sacked he got news that he was about to be made a liason to South Lebanon (as good as a death sentence) and a certain Ephraim---a higher ranking officer saved him by helping him escape to the U.S.
Whereupon Ephraim called in the favor qnd talked him into 'reforming' the organization by doing everything possible to undermmine it, thus bringing 'liberals' like Ephraim to power.
If we're not through the looking glass yet, here we go: The undermining consisted in Victor volunteering his services as an ex-Mossad agent to The British, The KGB, The Jordanians (!) and The Egyptians, among others.
The KGB didn't bite because they had a mole inside--however their refusal confirmed Ephraim's suspicions--he uncovered the mole and became a hero. The Brits were more accomodating, but cheap. The Jordanians--well, you've got to read that chapter, suffice it to say that according to Victor he had to fly to Jordan, whereupon things got very James Bondian and even more surreal. The Egyptians threw him in a cell.
In the end, Ephraim does take over but then he tries to assasinate Victor, to tie up loose ends.
Compelling, well documented, and absolutely nuts.
Background to Dangers.......2003-09-22
This book is a factual account of events as they occurred before the publication of his first book (Chapter 28). The Prologue gives his family history, and why he joined the Mossad. Chapter 1 tells how a NATO sleeper cell was used to create atrocities that could be blamed on Communists, and destabilize the left leaning Belgian government (pp,4-5). Chapter 2 tells how they worked with an American company that had desired technology (p.10). Chapter 4 explains how the Jordanian peace initiative was stopped. In Chapter 6 Victor was kicked out of the Mossad, and immediately recruited into a secret organization. Chapter 8 tells how a new head of the Mossad was stopped from taking office. Chapter 9 tells of his secret mission to the KGB to offer himself as a spy (Chapter 13). This would expose a suspected mole.
Chapter 15 explains how Libya was blamed for a discotheque bombing in 1986. The US retaliation kept Libya "out of the picture". Victor then learns how turmoil was created between Kuwait and Iraq. Chapter 17 describes the safe house system in London. Victor traveled to Jordan to advise them on detecting moles. Chapter 21 tells of "humanitarian assistance" to blacks in Soweto, using a Baltimore hospital for cover. Were they testing medications and diseases? Victor explains the Pollard affair, why Pollard knew too much. Pollard's information was traded to the Soviets to release Jews; Pollard was used and then flushed! Chapter 22 tells of his visit to Egypt, and their interest in Robert Maxwell. Maxwell bought media to influence public opinion, and to provide a cover for assets in other countries; page 204 tells how this worked.
Chapter 23 tells how background information was obtained from strangers (p.208). The Vanunu affair is explained (p.209). In Chapter 25 Victor decides to write his book on the Mossad. Operation Hannibal sold military supplies to Iran. Page 228 tells how Kurt Waldheim was branded as a Nazi! Page 231 explains how a politician was smeared and defeated. When this politician tried to clear himself, he was lured to Geneva and given a heart attack (pp.234-5). In Chapter 26 Victor travels to Paris to tell the French secret service about the Mossad's links with fascist elements (p.242). They later asked Victor to investigate the leading advocate of privatization in the US (p.244). This member of the Libertarian Party sought to destabilize a French South Pacific island.
Chapter 27 tells about the propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein (p.247). Iraq targeted Iranian cities using information from American satellites. Pages 250-1 tell how a reporter (who knew too much) was lured into a fatal mission. Then there is the planted story of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction". Page 259 tells of the safest sanctuary around - an airport! Chapter 30 tells of President George Bush's visit to the Madrid peace talks, and the failed assassination attempt. Chapter 31 explains Robert Maxwell's partnership with the Mossad, and why he had to be silenced. It was not that he knew too much, but that he began to talk too much under pressure of bankruptcy. Chapter 31 ends the book with his tour of Europe to promote his first novel. A problem occurred in Belgium; Victor knew of the corruption of the Belgian police force. Victor then realized that his connection in the Mossad was no longer reliable (p.290).
A REALITY CHECK FOR "TRUE BELIEVERS".......2003-08-28
Ostrovsky is not just another short term intel employee who was bounced, bitter, and then became a book author. For anybody who has served in intelligence, it rings true. It's a dirty business, whether HQ is in Virginia or Tel Aviv. It has to be. The few detractors in the amazon reviews of Ostrovsky's book just plain don't know. Having written an espionage expose myself, and having been eviscerated by some readers who barely can read, I'm not surprised by the negative reviews, but by how few there are. Read The Other Side of Deception, not just for an inside view of the Mossad, but for a parallel to what's going on now in America and it's intelligence services.
Book Description
Called "a first-rate spy story" (Entertainment Weekly), The Bureau and the Mole is the sensational New York Times best-seller that tells the inside story of FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Philip Hanssen, a seemingly all-American boy who would become the perfect traitor, jeopardizing America's national security for over twenty years by selling top-secret information to the Russians. Drawing from a wide variety of sources in the FBI, the Justice Department, the White House, and the intelligence community, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David A. Vise tells the story of how Hanssen employed the very sources and methods his own nation had entrusted to him in a devious game of deceit -- simply because he had something to prove. Vise also interweaves the narrative of how FBI director Louis B. Freeh led the government's desperate search for its betrayer among its own ranks, from the false leads, to the near misses, to its ultimate, shocking conclusion. Fascinating, gripping, and provocative, The Bureau and the Mole is a harrowing tale of how one man's treachery rocked a fraternity built on fidelity, bravery, and integrity -- and how the dedicated perseverance of another brought him to justice. "Absorbing ... Vise's account of Mr. Hanssen's road to becoming a double agent is fascinating." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Brisk, well documented ... a penetrating study of the villain and a gripping summary of the appalling evidence against him." -- Charles McCarry, The Wall Street Journal "A carefully researched and compelling account, with a startling bombshell." -- David W. Marston, The Baltimore Sun "Intelligent and well researched." -- Allen Weinstein, The Washington Post Book World
Customer Reviews:
Read a better book.......2007-09-30
This book doesn't compare with David Wise's book "Spy, The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America." There seems to be a lot of assumptions and conjecture's in the Vise book. Wise has much better sources.
Good Book!.......2007-09-27
The book provided background on not only Robert Hanssen, but also the individuals associated with the job. I enjoyed the book very much.
Frightening!.......2007-07-26
A frightening look into the mind and works of a socially inadequate FBI Agent who betrayed the American people, trading their safety over cash and diamond. The most disturbing fact was his fantasy of retiring from the FBI and move to Moscow and train future spies. The author did an excellent job in telling the lives of a deceitful Hanssen and of a dedicated Director Freeh.
Undoubtedly written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist.
Check also: They Spy who Stayed out in the Cold.
Cold Eyes
Robert Hanssen.......2007-05-12
I felt the book was very interesting. It has a good narative form.
I do feel, however, it could have been less graphic on some of Robert's home life. I did read it after seeing the movie "Breach". The book's characterizations of the two main personalities added interest. The author has done a good job with a difficult subject
Fascinating Book.......2007-03-15
This book was a page turner. The author built a psychological profile of Robert Hansesn as well as reported historical facts, to try to give us some insight into his motivation, as well as placed him in a historical context. How could someone who loved this country and was devoted to law enforcement become such a terrible traitor and cause the death of so many people? It gives an amazing account.
Book Description
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Customer Reviews:
The contagious paranoia of counterintelligence..........2006-01-01
The term, "wilderness of mirrors," is still used today in counterintelligence circles to denote the feelings of paranoia that sometimes develop in the byzantine business of spyhunting, when one is no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what is illusion. When conjuring up images of this precise phenomenon, no name rings louder than that of James Jesus Angleton, who himself was enveloped and ultimately destroyed by his obsession with uncovering a "mole" within the CIA.
Martin's brief account of the CIA's largely unsuccessful efforts to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War alternates between the stories of "Jim" Angleton and "Bill" Harvey, two CIA trailblazers who undoubtedly left their marks in their profession. What's unfortunate is that while they may have scored some early successes, they spent the latter parts of their careers in shambles, with both resigning under hostile circumstances. Especially in Angleton's case, it is tough to objectively determine whether he did more good than bad.
For a more detailed account of the CI fiasco involving Angleton, Golitsin, and Nosenko, check out David Wise's "Molehunt."
Help! The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum!!!.......2005-08-16
This book, which relates the ongoing war between the CIA and the KGB, focuses on the activities of William K. Harvey, a gun-totin' ex-FBI agent (who does not seem to have entirely evolved in a social sense), and James Jesus Angleton, a Yale graduate who lived first in Italy and then in England, where he learned the fine arts of counter-espionage at the knees, as it were, of Kim Philby, and was in charge of counter-espionage at the CIA. The revelation that the latter was a KGB penetration agent in British Intelligence seems to have engendered extreme paranoia in the former, who was ever after on the lookout for moles in the Agency (and was even suspected by some of his colleagues of being one himself).
The tales of covert operations range from the amusing (an agent loitering in a park to make a dead-letter drop being arrested as a potential child molester) to the appalling (the dastardly enticement of the Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko with promises of a salaried job and then keeping him in what was tantamount to a cage for 1277 days (292 of which were devoted to interrogation) [p, 171], all because of the dubious word of Anatoli Golitsin, a previous defector--living high off the hog at taxpayer expense--who warned that the next defector would be a KGB plant.). Angleton placed his faith unstintingly in Golitsin, whose wild scenarios had Averell Harriman, a former United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, cast as a KGB agent. It never seems to have occurred to Angleton that Golitsin may have been the KGB plant, intent on making mischief.
The title, "Wilderness of Mirrors," was apparently coined by Angleton, who was a poet in his spare time. It refers to the labyrinthine world of espionage into which one is "lured deeper and deeper ... pursuing the traces of Soviet plots, both real and imagined, each step taking [one] farther into a bewildering world of intrigue ... [p. 10].
The author notes the justification of the battle between the CIA and the KGB, but he also cites the absurdity of its reality. "The careers of Angleton and Harvey were mired in absurdities, not the least of which was that they habitually violated the democratic freedoms they were sworn to defend . . . Immersed in duplicity and insulated by secrecy, they developed survival mechanisms and behavior patterns that by any rational standard were bizarre. The forced inbreeding of secrecy spawned mutant deeds and thoughts. Loyalty demanded dishonesty, and duty was a thieves' game. The game attracted strange men and slowly twisted them until something snapped. There were no winners or losers in this game, only victims" [p. 226].
Anti-Angleton.......2004-01-06
This is one of the anti-Angleton books. You you want to understand Angelton's approach to counter-intelligence, I would recommend Edward Jay Epstein's "Deception" instead.
Book Description
The content and services available on the web continue to be accessed mostly through direct human control. But this is changing. Increasingly, users rely on automated agents that save them time and effort by programmatically retrieving content, performing complex interactions, and aggregating data from diverse sources. Programming Spiders, Bots, and Aggregators in Java teaches you how to build and deploy a wide variety of these agents-from single-purpose bots to exploratory spiders to aggregators that present a unified view of information from multiple user accounts.
You will quickly build on your basic knowledge of Java to quickly master the techniques that are essential to this specialized world of programming, including parsing HTML, interpreting data, working with cookies, reading and writing XML, and managing high-volume workloads. You'll also learn about the ethical issues associated with bot use--and the limitations imposed by some websites.
This book offers two levels of instruction, both of which are focused on the library of routines provided on the companion CD. If your main concern is adding ready-made functionality to an application, you'll achieve your goals quickly thanks to step-by-step instructions and sample programs that illustrate effective implementations. If you're interested in the technologies underlying these routines, you'll find in-depth explanations of how they work and the techniques required for customization.
Customer Reviews:
Lots of working code but not much of a tutorial.......2006-07-16
Bots are the simplest form of Internet-aware programs in that they simply carry out a repetitive task once unleashed on the web. A spider travels the web in a complex fashion, moving from one part of the World Wide Web to another collecting information from one site and then jumping to another based on that information. An aggregator is a bot that is designed to log into several user accounts and retrieve similar information.
If you need a complete bot, spider, or aggregator written in Java, complete with source code and a detailed manual about that source code so that you can customize it to suit your needs, this is a five star book. However, if you are looking for a book about information storage and retrieval and network programming that focuses on the theory of operation of such software with application code written in Java, you will be sorely disappointed.
The author did such a fine job of documenting his work with excellent diagrams, comments, and the book that reads like a user's manual, that I easily took his Web spider code and modified it to perform many additional tasks that his basic package does not do. All of the hooks are available in his code for you to modify it to collect or examine just about any kind of data accessible via the web.
I highly recommend this book if you are taking an information storage and retrieval class and you would like to read and study something applied on spiders, bots, and aggregators versus the theory you get in most textbooks. Just understand you are getting code plus a user's manual, not a tutorial. You are definitely going to need other resources on Java network programming if you want to study, understand, or modify the included source code. I suggest the latest edition of "Java Network Programming" by Elliotte Rusty Harold for help with the network programming part of bots, spiders, and aggregates. I also suggest you look at "Spidering Hacks", which has many good ideas of features you can add to your web spider.
Not much information for such a long book.......2004-06-24
The essence of this book could probably have been compressed into a few chapters. I read the whole thing in about a day, skimming over many sections (e.g. the structure of HTML, including discussion of anchor tags) that I, like most programmers, already know well. I think I would have preferred a focussed tutorial on Heaton's Bot package instead of a detailed but boring treatment of every technology (however elementary) used in the process of constructing spiders and bots.
Aside from this, Heaton is not a great writer. Attempting to be particularly organized and structured, he comes off as excessively stiff; I stopped counting the number of times he wrote "I will now show how to..."
I purchased this book expecting the process of constructing a spider or bot to draw on a range of specialized skills, but it appears to be quite simple: basic knowledge of Java network programming (i.e. sockets), HTTP, HTML and XML parsing would appear to suffice. I'm sure there is all sorts of complex stuff Heaton does not talk about, but I wish he had!
At the moment I'm wondering whether this book deserves a space on my finite bookshelf.
Create a Object Oriented Bot Package Step by Step.......2004-04-26
I use this book as a supplement to a class that I teach, as it gives the students the necessary stills to programmatically spider, and generally access, information on the Net.
As some of the other reviewers point out, this book does center around the creation of a "bot package". However, I see this as one of the book's greatest strengths. The author explains step by step how to take basic concepts, continually build upon them, progressing onward to more complex spiders and bots. Specifically:
1. Create an advanced HTTP object that overcomes many of the shortcomings of the one which is built into Java. (namely cookie support, referrer support, HTTP authentication, and more)
2. Add forms/page processing on top of the HTTP object. You are shown step by step how to process the data you collect from step 1.
3. Create a bot that wields the page/form processing created in step 2.
4. Create a spider, that, using steps 1-3, can access pages across an entire site.
5. Expand the spider to support thread pooling and a JDBC database.
Rather than providing a bunch of disjoint code samples, like many books do. The author guides you step by step through the above path, revealing the techniques at every step. For the reader who does not care about the intricate nature of bot programming, sadly, some of my students. You can skip to the API documentation and get right onto creating your own bots. You can also download updated versions of the "bot package" from the author's site. I actually did this before buying the book.
The downsides to the book are the example programs use of GUI's. I would rather every example had been straight console, the GUI only gets in the way, for a book targeting bot programming. Also the author very annoyingly putting an underscore in front of every class-instance variable, which gives some of the code something of a C++ look I suppose.
If you are already programming bots and spiders of your own, I don't think you will get much more from this book than you are likely already doing.
But for someone who wants to get started in this exciting area, there is nothing else like it, and I highly recommend it.
Misleading Title.......2003-12-23
As another reviewer commented this book should be called using the com.heaton.bot package api reference. All you learn is how to use this package of java classes, not how to actually create spiders, bots or aggregators from the ground up. I feel the title is misleading for such an expensive book. The only way I will learn what I want is to read the authors source code - which btw is very ugly however functional.
happy.......2003-11-07
Visual Cafe produces the Swing so one can view the examples from the book. So what?
When beginning to program with HTTP protocols, it's easy to enter incorrect methods and parameters that lead to dead-ends and frustration. As I learn about and use the Heaton API, I am pleasantly surprised with the methods available and how easily they're implemented and that they lead to success.
The source code is included on the CD with updated versions at the Heaton Website.
Books:
- Charlotte's Web (Trophy Newbery)
- Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone
- Civil Rights Chronicle (The African-American Struggle for Freedom)
- Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality
- Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy And the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East
- Conservatives Without Conscience
- Created Equal, Brief Edition, Single Volume Edition
- Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War (American Empire Project)
- Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
- Doing Democracy
Books Index
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Recommended Books
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- Creative Cloth Doll Faces: Using Paints, Pastels, Fibers, Beading, Collage, and Sculpting Techniques
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- 50 Fast Photoshop 7 Techniques
- American Cinema/American Culture
- History: Fiction or Science
- Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper
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- Wiley CPA Examination Review 2003, 4-Volume Set
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Afghanistan
| Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
