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Book Description

Enhance your botting skills and create your own web bots with PHP

  • Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results
  • Learn how to design bots for specific projects
  • Develop an HTTP package for executing requests and handling HTTP responses
  • Create a web bot and learn how use the bot as an object
  • Build document objects that easily search and use data harvested by bots
  • hvDiscuss and develop some important bot features like data parsing, bot tracing, storing data, and more

In Detail

Bots can be used effortlessly to execute projects and tasks that will save time and funds. Bots are powerful tools that should be in every knowledgeable programmer’s toolbox. Developing and integrating bots into your programs may be easier than expected. They simply perform the tasks that they were designed to complete, which makes them the perfect solution for many task requirements.

Instant Simple Botting with PHP is an easy-to-read book that will give you the knowledge required to design and develop ready-to-use bots. The book covers useful bot features that can be added to the bots created during the course of the book. Learn how to improve your efficiency as a programmer or software system administrator by unleashing the power of bots.

Instant Simple Botting with PHP walks you through HTTP requests and responses, how to build basic bots, how to use objects to make using bots easier, and how to parse and utilize data retrieved by bots.

This book will also teach you how to plan ahead when designing bots, what types of methods can be helpful when developing bots, and various objects that can be used with bots, like document objects. You will also learn about bot stealth, which is an important aspect of any bot that is designed to complete bulky tasks, such as spider crawling thousands of pages of a website.

After reading this book, you should be able to build your own bots, understand the benefits and advantages of using objects to create web robots and bot related objects, and how to parse and use the data your bots gather.

Table of Contents

  1. Instant Simple Botting with PHP
    1. Instant Simple Botting with PHP
    2. Credits
    3. About the Author
    4. About the Reviewers
    5. www.packtpub.com
      1. Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more
    6. packtlib.packtpub.com
      1. Why Subscribe?
      2. Free Access for Packt account holders
    7. 1. Instant Simple Botting with PHP
      1. So, what is Simple Botting with PHP?
        1. HTTP request types
        2. Simple is smarter
        3. Code example expectations
      2. Installation
        1. Step 1 – setting the development environment
          1. PHP error reporting
        2. Step 2 – command-line applications
        3. And that's it!
      3. Quick start - developing a bot
        1. Step 1 – HTTP request classes
        2. Step 2 – HTTP response class
        3. Why use objects?
        4. Step 3 – using bootstrap files
        5. Step 4 – creating our first bot, WebBot
        6. Step 5 – the WebBot class
        7. Step 6 – the WebBot Document class
        8. Step 7– the WebBot bootstrap file
        9. Step 8 – the WebBot execution
        10. Step 9 – the WebBot results
      4. Top 5 features you need to know about
        1. Bot tracing debug logging
        2. Parsing bot data
        3. Storing data
        4. Bot stealth
        5. Other advanced features
      5. People and places you should get to know
        1. Helpful sites
        2. A warning about using bots
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