Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

Pallmann writes of tricks and techniques that rely on a world where web page information remains static. Bots that harvest fixed format information depend on webpages that don't change the format or structure of the data.

While the techniques are valid, this book describes a technical solution in search of a problem.

Easy to read and informative. The jewel in this book is the source code for the objects that are ready to use right out of the box. If you need to put together an application that mines information from the internet really quickly, this is the book. This book is about retrieving and parsing http, (port 80) only.

I found this book to be extremely useful and insightful into a topic that I had previously only been briefly exposed to. I personally don't care about the details of some of the underlying protocols put to use, and just enjoy the fact that it was written for those of us who are using Visual C++ 6.0! The book is very clear and easy to understand. Many thanks goes out to the author for all his time and effort spent into creating a book like this!

Good book- but not exactly for the beginner. I would reccomend this book for the C++ seasoned. This book mainly covers how to use the classes included with the book to implement site crawling, etc. The classes included on the CD are great. Good buy!

Covered everything I needed to know to write an intelligent data gathering web bot. The material is accurate, relevant and up to date while covering the subject matter to a depth that you would normally expect from a third edition text. Do my business a favour and don't buy this book.

This is a good book if you are an expert in MFC, but if you are not an expert in C++. You might want to get a MFC book before getting this one. It gave pretty good examples though. The only thing I really didn't like was I thought the book was too long for something you could learn easily with a few examples.

The author did a great job in explaining everything so clearly. Mr. Pallmann is the person who really understands the technology, and his book certainly fills in a gap in this particular area. However, in order to fully apprepriate this book, one needs good grounding in VC++ and MFC.

Overall, this is a book of very high quality. The lives of numerous software developers would be much better if every computer book could be written like this one.