Programming Bots, Spiders, and Intelligent Agents in Microsoft Visual C++ [Paperback]

David Pallmann (Author)

Book Description

Series: Programming | Publication Date: April 1, 1999

Written by a prolific innovator in the agent arena, this guide offers specific instruction for leveraging Visual C++ skills to build robots, spiders crawlers, and intelligent agents. The CD-ROM houses recyclable agents, in addition to reusable C++ classes and AlphaCONNECT agent software.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Programming Bots, Spiders, and Intelligent Agents in Microsoft Visual C++ showcases the basics of creating autonomous Internet programs such as bots and agents. Besides offering an introduction to writing "intelligent" software, this book provides excellent background material on Internet programming in general.

The first part of the book examines the differences between simple bots (such as Web crawlers) and more advanced, intelligent agents (which communicate more directly with users). The author discusses security and access issues for creating well-behaved bots that Webmasters will find more acceptable.

Author David Pallmann's four powerful custom Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) for building bots are at the heart of this book. After introducing them, he features material on scheduling bot activity and logging the results and includes samples for tracking Web site changes (along with logging). Information on mapping Web sites with a real Web crawler follows, including a discussion of multithreading for improved performance.

Pallmann features plenty of material on design issues with agents, which should be as unobtrusive, reliable, and flexible as possible. Samples include an agent that monitors weather information on the Web and one that hunts down stock information.

Final chapters look at some of the issues inherent in processing HTML programmatically. (The book has some good tips for managing ill-formed HTML pages.) There is also an excellent review of the basics of Internet programming for HTTP and FTP in MFC (and even a quick tour of open database connectivity [ODBC] database programming). In all, this book provides some great sample code along with a thorough introduction to what goes into building today's intelligent Internet bots and agents. --Richard Dragan

Product Details

• Paperback: 679 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735605653
• ISBN-13: 978-0735605657
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #592,828 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not what I was expecting, January 12, 2000

By 

Larry (Torrance) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming Bots, Spiders, and Intelligent Agents in Microsoft Visual C++ (Paperback)

As I proceeded through this book, I found myself doing more skimming than reading. It might be useful to you if you don't have a clue about network programming or internet protocols, to get your feet wet using WinInit and the supplied classes, but if you're looking for nuts and bolts information about protocols, THIS BOOK IS NOT THE ONE YOU'RE LOOKING FOR. The projects in this book rely on WinInit and MSIE to perform the magic, and you won't learn much about the underlying protocols. I was also disappointed to see typos and errors in virtually every example in the book; bad news if you actually read the code to try to understand how things work.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not what it seems to be, December 16, 1999

By 

Marc Hoeppner "Marc Hoeppner, Microsoft Regio... (Hamburg) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming Bots, Spiders, and Intelligent Agents in Microsoft Visual C++ (Paperback)

This book is not really what it seems to be. It mainly consists of coding examples that are freely available on the Internet anyway. If you need to know more about programming WinInet and using VC++, this for you. If you are looking for help/insights/code for designing/programming agents, this will _not_ help you!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars possibly good for absolute neophytes, August 11, 1999

By 

Mike O'Connor ([e-mail]) (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming Bots, Spiders, and Intelligent Agents in Microsoft Visual C++ (Paperback)

I came to this book with a backgound as co-author of a "spider" and search engine written in Java, but with little experience programming for the Windows platform.

Although I found the book to be an excellent overview of the Microsoft technologies involved with writing a native spider for Windows, the implementation details presented turned out to be incorrect in material places like controlling fetch timeouts. (The author claims this is not possible. A bit of poking around in the

Visual C++ 6 documentation proved that this just ain't so. )

I read Blaszczak's _Professional MFC with Visual C++ 5_ at the same time, and found everything I needed to know, presented in a more concise way. I would recommend Blazczak over Pallmann for anyone with goals similar to mine.