A collection of different short articles by various authors on various aspects of spidering, scraping and crawling. As a result, this book is entirely incoherent with lots of redundancy between articles - and lots of gaps, to. Do not expect to be taken by the hand starting from scratch and being led towards guru-level. Essentially, the articles provide a good summary for those who already have a fair grasp of what is going on in that domain anyway. Entry level is at object-oriented Perl upwards.

I was expecting a coherent book that would teach me and take me gently through all the different levels. This is not what I got. Those who are good enough at Perl to gain something from this book probably have better and more concise sources where they can look up the coding. In summary, a reasonable buy for experienced Perl programmers who want to find out about the web-based aspects of Perl -- so do adjust your expectations accordingly before you buy!