Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox [Paperback]

Mark Pilgrim (Author)

Book Description

Series: Hacks | Publication Date: November 22, 2005

Greasemonkey Hacks is an invaluable compendium 100 ingenious hacks for power users who want to master Greasemonkey, the hot new Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. With Greasemonkey, you can create scripts that make a web site more usable, fix rendering bugs that site owners can't be bothered to fix themselves, or add items to a web site's menu bar. You can alter pages so they work better with technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille. Greasemonkey gurus can even import, combine, and alter data from different web sites to meet their own specific needs.

Greasemonkey has achieved a cult-like following in its short lifespan, but its uses are just beginning to be explored. Let's say you're shopping on an e-commerce site. You can create a script that will automatically display competitive prices for that particular product from other web sites. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and your Greasemonkey expertise. Greasemonkey Hacks can't help you with the imagination part, but it can provide the expert hacks-complete with the sample code-you need to turn your brainstorms into reality.

More than just an essential collection of made-to-order Greasemonkey solutions, Greasemonkey Hacks is crammed with sample code, a Greasemonkey API reference, and a comprehensive list of resources, to ensure that every resource you need is available between its covers.

Some people are content to receive information from websites passively; some people want to control it. If you are one of the latter, Greasemonkey Hacks provides all the clever customizations and cutting-edge tips and tools you need to take command of any web page you view.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mark Pilgrim is an accessibility architect in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group. He is the author of several technical books, including Dive Into Python (APress) and Dive Into Accessibility, a free online tutorial on web accessibility. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and newborn son, and spends his copious free time sunbathing, skydiving, and reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (November 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596101651
• ISBN-13: 978-0596101657
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,244 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Good Introduction to the Topic, December 23, 2005

By 

Jase T. Wolfe - See all my reviews

This review is from: Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox (Paperback)

Greasemonkey (GM) is an extension (arguably one of the most useful) for the Firefox browser. GM is an agent that allows the dynamic alteration and manipulation of web pages via scripts which run after the page is loaded but before it is rendered to you. GM opens the Document Object Model (DOM) of other people's web pages up to client-side access, which gives you the power to add, remove and change the content of that web page to suit your tastes and needs - almost exactly if you had written the web page yourself. GM, however, is only the hosting engine. All the real work is performed by implementing JavaScript files, that you or someone else has written.

Greasemonkey Hacks is a great read and a valuable "ideas" asset, but only if you fit into the niche it is written for. As GM is nothing more than an interface host for dynamic scripting, not a lot other than an overview of the extension, where to get it, and a how to use its few dialogs can be written about. Indeed, it already has been covered before and is freely available on the extension's home page (Greasemonkey dot Mozdev dot Org). As GM makes the DOM available to custom JavaScripts, unless you only intend to look for and run other peoples scripts (which is quite doable as UserScripts dot Org makes hundreds of thousands of them readily available, some of which appear in this book), a working knowledge of the DOM and JavaScript is needed. The author does not spend much time covering what GM is, and very little time covering any JavaScripting or DOM objects; you are expected to already understand what you see. What this title does give you is hundreds of pages of ideas, accomplished by presenting recipe script after recipe script complete with discussions and explanations.

The book is well written, and entertaining to read. The information presented within ranges from novice to advanced (if you're into scripting) and is never dumbed down or made overly complicated. If you're really interested in writing your own web browsing "hacks", this is an excellent read as it provides a great guided introduction into the topic, beyond what you would get if you just threw yourself into the GM-related websites. If you find the possibilities tantalizing, you won't be sorry you purchased this book. But, as this is not a how-to or learning book for the DOM or for JavaScript, I couldn't recommend it above the GM websites to the casual Firefox user or those who do not script.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'll never view the browser experience the same again..., February 4, 2006

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox (Paperback)

Bottom line... I'm hooked. I was vaguely aware of what Greasemonkey was, but I really hadn't taken the time to explore it. That time is now over. I had a chance to review a copy of Greasemonkey Hacks by Mark Pilgrim, and I don't think I'll look at web browsing the same again.

Contents: Getting Started; Linkmania!; Beautifying the Web; Web Forms; Developer Tools; Search; Web Mail; Accessibility; Taking Back the Browser; Syndication; Site Integration; Those Not Included in This Classification; Index

This is a typical O'Reilly Hacks title, where you have 100 tips and tricks on exploiting some technology or toy. In this volume, Mark Pilgrim shows how you can use the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox to completely change the way you interact with web pages. The first two tips show how to install Greasemonkey and how to install a Greasemonkey script that you either download or write yourself. From there, it's all over the board as far as what you can do with these script gems. Tired of dealing with URLs on a site that aren't clickable? Check out tip #13 (Turn Naked URLs into Hyperlinks). Want to have a web page refresh itself automatically every x minutes (even though they don't have a meta refresh tag)? Then go to tip #41 (Refresh Pages Automatically). And my favorite... Hate those web site registrations that force you to enter basic information every time just to see the content? Do you normally use BugMeNot to find an existing registration? Wish that all could be integrated and automated in your browser? Tip #84 - Bypass Annoying Site Registration. I can tell you that this one was the first Greasemonkey script I installed, and it's way cool...

This is really not a "how to code Greasemonkey scripts" book. You're dealing with JavaScript and the document object model, but Pilgrim and his group of contributors don't spend any time trying to teach you how to do all that. The book delivers the scripts already coded and tested, and you just have to install them. But that's not bad, and it works on a number of levels. If you've never used Greasemonkey, it's a great way to discover the power (as I did). And if you *are* a Greasemonkey user and/or developer, this will give you many new ideas on scripts you might want to write yourself. And since you can download the scripts from the O'Reilly site, you already have a solid base of code from which to start. Hard to beat that in terms of value...

Obviously, I like tech books and I read a lot. But not often do I run across a book that ends up changing the way I view the basic technology I touch every day. If I wasn't a Firefox user, this book would convince me to become one in short order. As a Firefox user, I'm now convinced that I can personalize and manipulate web sites and information in ways I never imaged. This is really a recommended read...

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take Back the Web, November 23, 2005

By 

Scott R. Turner (Reston, Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Greasemonkey Hacks: Tips & Tools for Remixing the Web with Firefox (Paperback)

Since its inception, the Web has been a one-way pipe from the information suppliers to the consumers: take what we offer and like it. Greasemonkey turns that paradigm on its ear by giving the user of the Web the power and the tools to change Web sites to suit his own needs.

But Greasemonkey requires programming in Javascript. That's within reach for most technically-savvy Web users, but easy for only a few. Platypus (platypus.mozdev.org) provides a graphical interface for creating Greasemonkey scripts, but if you want to create anything unique or deeply powerful, you'll have to tackle Javascript programming.

That's where this book comes in. With a hundred examples of different Greasemonkey scripts, all of them clearly explained by the author of "Dive into Python" and "Dive into Greasemonkey", this book provides the basic recipes for almost any sort of script you'd like to create. By cutting, pasting and recombining what you find in this book, you'll be able to shape any Web site to your own vision without spending years plumbing the esoteric depths of Javascript and the Firefox browser.

If you can't amaze yourself with Greasemonkey, don't blame this book. Blame your lack of imagination!

-- Scott Turner