Upon A Dark Night (Peter Diamond Mystery)

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Cleanly written police procedural.

One of my favorites

fantastic Diamond police procedural

Classic Detection a la Peter Diamond.

Enjoyable with a tense climax.

Upon A Dark Night (Peter Diamond Mystery)
Peter Lovesey
Manufacturer: Soho Crime
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1569473935

Book Description

"The threads of Peter Lovesey's new Peter Diamond mystery, Upon a Dark Night, twist up so neatly they make a perfect hangman's noose-another triumph of plotting from this master of the classic puzzle form."-Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"Lovesey is . . . master of the traditional crime novel." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The characters are complex and well-drawn, the plot intricate but credible, the story well-told and the puzzles neatly tied up by the end."-Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"An extraordinary combination of classic puzzle with a contemporary police procedural; an immensely satisfying work by one of Britain's foremost mystery novelists."-Houston Chronicle

"Lovesey's latest Peter Diamond novel offers everything a fan of classic detective fiction could want."-Booklist

A young woman is dumped, injured and unconscious, in a private hospital's parking lot. She is an amnesiac with no memory prior to her discovery by hospital personnel. Detective Inspector Peter Diamond of the Bath homicide squad is unwilling to become involved. He has other, more important cases to solve: A woman has plunged to her death from the roof of a local landmark while half the young people of Bath partied below, and an elderly farmer has shot himself. Are these apparent suicides really so, or are there sinister forces at work? And then he finds a connection to the amnesiac woman named, temporarily, Rose.

Peter Lovesey is the author of 24 highly praised mysteries and has been awarded The Crime Writers' Association's Gold, Silver and Diamond Daggers, as well as many US honors. He lives in West Sussex, England.

Customer Reviews:

Cleanly written police procedural........2007-03-12

This was my first Peter Diamond novel, and I immediately liked the character. Despite a surfeit of gruff and unlikeable middle aged English detectives, Diamond still stands out as well-drawn and interesting.

At the beginning of the book, the only threat facing Diamond is that he might die of boredom. He starts investigating apparent suicides in Bath out of a lack of more obvious murders to pursue. When his investigation ties in with the mysterious case of the amnesiac found wandering the roads of Bath, his life gets rather more exciting than he might have wanted.

I had some issues with the way that the two major threads of the story were knitted together. I felt as though this affected the pacing-- particularly in the second half of the novel. Still, I liked both threads and the book kept me reading.

Recommended for fans of British police procedurals. I will be picking up another in the series when I get the chance.

One of my favorites.......2006-01-30

UPON A DARK NIGHT is one of my favorites in the Peter Diamond series. In spite of his gruff, rather unloveable personality, Peter Diamond has an amazing ability to tease out the link between two apparently unrelated deaths, a farmer, who apparently killed himself with a shotgun and a woman, who jumped/fell off of the roof of a building. While everyone else in the department figures, including his rival, John Wigfall, concludes each died by suicide, Diamond comes to believe that the cause of death is not so obvious. Complicating the cases is a missing person named Rose, reported by a notorious shoplifter named Ada, who has not exactly endeared herself to the Old Bill. Soon, Peter connects all three cases with an unlikely suspect and he races against time to prevent another murder disguised as suicide.

Peter Lovesey is one of the best crime fiction writers today. This is not an English cozy, but an extremely well-written police procedural mystery, well-paced with an intricately woven plot. I would highly recommend both the series and this book.

fantastic Diamond police procedural .......2005-06-04

Things have been so quiet lately; Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond suffers from hypertension caused by ennui as he has not had a homicide to keep his blood pressure level. Normally Diamond would ignore an apparent suicide by a farmer, but with nothing else to occupy his time, he decides to take a quick look. First thing he realizes that the farmer's arms were too small to pull the trigger of a shotgun placed under his chin

Peter simultaneously investigates what he believes is a homicide while trying to persuade his superior that someone killed the farmer. At about the same time, a girl falls off a rooftop during a party. Initial reaction was it was a tragic accident, but Diamond sees incongruities with that explanation. He investigates both deaths while an amnesiac is found in a hospital parking lot by a shoplifter Ada who reluctantly releases the woman to someone claiming to be a sister. Ada talks with Diamond, who reluctantly follows up her comments and links the two deaths and the abduction with a fourth party as he begins to find the buried connection.

UPON A DARK NIGHT is a fantastic Diamond police procedural as the cop is at his curmudgeon worst due to absolute boredom from no cases; only someone like Diamond could bemoan a major drop in the murder rate. Thus two homicides would have probably remained under the radar screen with the killer free except that Diamond basically had nothing interesting to do. The mystery is brilliantly established so the audience like Diamond's boss sees no foul play until Diamond's inquiries begin to cleverly prove otherwise. Peter Lovesey is at his best with this awesome who-done-it.

Harriet Klausner

Classic Detection a la Peter Diamond........2004-02-11

The Peter Diamond series is a great series, and this book is a good one. Peter is suffering from the stress of lack of work in Bath. Then there seems to be a lot of unexplained suicides on his patch. He begins by investigating one of them, and it turns out to have a lot of unexplained puzzles. Could it be murder? And what about the other suicide? Introduce a young girl with unexplained amnesia and Peter's got more puzzles than he knows what to do with. Lovesey characterizations are wonderful and this book is no different. It's complicated, neat and has a great plot.

Enjoyable with a tense climax........2002-09-13

This was my first Lovesey/Diamond book. I'll be back for more.

Average customer rating:

Diamonds in the Dark
Jack Graham
Manufacturer: Thomas Nelson Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Christianity | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

General | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Inspirational | Spirituality | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Devotionals | Spirituality | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
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Lessons From the Heart: Learning to Trust God for True Peace, Fulfillment and Joy

ASIN: 0785274278

Book Description

As a young boy, Jack Graham would gaze into the Texas sky on summer nights, awed by bright stars shimmering like diamonds in the dark. It was because of the darkness that the points of light shone so remarkably. And in those moments, Graham sensed God's presence was near as he contemplated the greatness and glory of the Creator. In this faith-affirming book, Graham examines the journeys of Jacob, Elijah, Daniel, Jonah, Peter, Paul, and others--men who powerfully encountered the Lord in the darkest of times. Diamonds in the Dark helps you to weave rich lessons from these biblical characters into your own life.

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Didn't Live Up
I never wanted it to end!! Fabulous!
An all-star cast of my generation! I swooned over Rod Taylor and Robert Culp!
WONDERFUL cast, beautifully performed, an EXCITING thrilling journey you won't forget!
"Hard Rock Lovers".....Beautifully done!!

Hard Rock Lovers
Paul Kyriazi
Manufacturer: Ronin Audio Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

Look Inside Science Fiction & Fantasy Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 0971618321

Product Description

Computer programmer Alan Bartlet takes his new girlfriend to Las Vegas. There he meets Medusa, a backup singer for the now dead rock star Shane. She hints that Shane might be alive. In flashback, we see the rise and fall of Shane. Alan pursues Medusa and descends into a world of mystery, lust and murder to find out: Is Shane Alive?

Customer Reviews:

Didn't Live Up.......2007-07-03

I absolutely love "The James Bond Lifestyle Seminar," but this audiobook fell short. The plot was decent, but nothing better than you'd expect based on the synopsis. The main character is supposed to be 33 years old, yet his voice sounds like an old man. He sounds very unsure of himself. Also, a lot more could have been done with the sound effects. They did not immerse me in the scenes, as another reviewer claimed.

I never wanted it to end!! Fabulous!.......2007-01-16

Mr Kyriazi's production of Hard Rock Lovers was just fantastic! I was on the edge of my seat on a daily basis! I put the audio book on my iPod and listened while I jogged. I gotta say it motivated me to get out there and I am so sad it is over! I cannot wait for his next Audio production!

The story is fantastic, gripping and sexy. I absolutely loved it!

Bravo!!!!

An all-star cast of my generation! I swooned over Rod Taylor and Robert Culp!.......2006-05-22

Wow! My sister pointed me to this audio book and I couldn't believe my ears. I just relaxed on my bed to listen and was absolutely delighted with the movie-quality of the sound effects. Not only is this a masterful, well-written plot, it's also a quality production. The best I've heard.

And those stars that the magnificent author/director Paul Kyriazi lined up for this special version of his book!!! Well, all I can say is that I remember swooning each time I saw any of them on the big screen. (I hope my hubby doesn't read this.) But when I saw Rod Taylor--who narrates this story, with such a come-hither voice--starring in The Birds with that gorgeous Tippi Hedren, I almost fainted. Yes, he was that much of a hunk ... and still is, according to my sister!

Incidentally, people used to say I looked like Tippi. Ah-hhh, memories ... But getting back to this audio book, I loved it to pieces.

Keep up the excellent work, Mr. K. You're terrific, and almost as handsome as the great Rod! Ciao, baby ...

WONDERFUL cast, beautifully performed, an EXCITING thrilling journey you won't forget!.......2006-03-15

From the moment Hard Rock Lovers comes on ... it takes you by the hand and mind, and immediately draws you into this intriquing story, narrated by the imcomparable Rod Taylor, of revenge, love, lust, cold reality and spiritual enlightenment.

Robert Culp kept me laughing with his perfect low-life agent performance, always the best! James Darren was the perfect rock star, mean, talented but sad, his performance was # 1. Ishtar Uhvana was great as Medusa, she added the sweetness to keep some reality in the rock world and her ending dialoque brought tears to my eyes. Loved Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris was brilliant as the evil Reynaldo, and Nefta Perry as Connie played the perfect Rosie Perez.

The ending gives you hope and leaves you with happy feelings. You will want to play it again and again; it only gets better each time you listen.

Paul Kyriazi is my hero. I am his BIGGEST fan.

Thank you Paul for the fun and exciting adventure!

"Hard Rock Lovers".....Beautifully done!!.......2006-03-14

The "Hard Rock Lovers" audio book was not at all what I expected, but what a wonderful surprise! It's a twisted, tangled web of events played out by a handful of multi-leveled, intertwined characters. The story is well written, beautifully told and convincingly enacted centering on the heights of a successful rock star and the terrible costs that are paid when that success is abused. People and events are manipulated by all the characters to satisfy their own needs and agenda.

"Good" and "evil" are blurred. "Life" and "death" are blurred. Relationships are blurred, but the irony of fate is boldly presented and it's made abundantly clear that our "next" existence offers another chance to hopefully do better. The inevitability of change, the subtle and sometimes dramatic interrelationships between cause and effect as well as the ever-present, ever-looming scales of divine and poetic justice are persistent threads. A beautiful blending of drama and melodrama are used to develop both the story and the characters. The audio presentation is top-notch entertainment, particularly when you consider that all acting is accomplished solely through vocal artistry. The actors do a fantastic job of inviting the listener into their world and moving you effortlessly through the story.

I really enjoyed listening to this audio book. It is wonderful from start to finish and my congratulations go out to all involved. It's a winner on all levels.

How Can a Brilliant Detective Shine in the Dark? (A Stevie Diamond Mystery)

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How Can a Brilliant Detective Shine in the Dark? (A Stevie Diamond Mystery)
Linda Bailey
Manufacturer: Kids Can Press, Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1550747509

Book Description

Even an experienced detective like Stevie Diamond can miss clues. All her life, a gigantic mystery was right there in her own family and she'd missed it, until now! How Can a Brilliant Detective Shine in the Dark? is a page-turning mix of mystery and comedy sure to capture the imaginations and tickle the funny bones of young readers everywhere.

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Dark Diamond Dancing
James Cornell
Manufacturer: Athena Press Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1844012417

After Dark, The Magazine of Entertainment : September 1981 , Volume 14 , Number 3/4, With Marilyn Monroe with Closed Eyes in Grey Fur & Silver Dress & Diamonds on Cover (AFTER DARK MAGAZINE, 14)

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After Dark, The Magazine of Entertainment : September 1981 , Volume 14 , Number 3/4, With Marilyn Monroe with Closed Eyes in Grey Fur & Silver Dress & Diamonds on Cover (AFTER DARK MAGAZINE, 14)
Norma McLain Stoop articles by Louis Miele
Manufacturer: AFTER DARK MAGAZINE
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Movies | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000MDE3C6

Product Description

MAGAZINE , 1980, 1st Edition, VG-/GOOD, SOLD AS-IS, SOFTCOVER, Slight Rub, Wear Scuff , tiny Crease Cover, Scuffing Along Spine Cover & Corner, Interior Nice Condition Light Wear., FOX, Tiny Nicks Scuff Pages Edges, , As you open Cover Clear Tape Reinforcement because Partial Spine Split, Cover Spine RIP, AFTER DARK MAGAZINE Publ, Editor in Chief Louis Miele, Art Director Neil Appelbaum, articles by Louis Miele ,Norma McLain Stoop , Mark Bego, Vito Russo ETC, Color & B/W Photographs by Juan Ramos, Jill Lynne , Mark Ivins, ETC, With Marilyn Monroe with Closed Eyes in Grey Fur & Silver Dress & Diamonds on Cover , with Photo Spread Inside, Includes , Adult Semi-Nudes, Liza Minnelli in Happy Endings Movie , Starr Danias of Joffrey Ballet, Fire Island Pool Party, Peter Allen recipient of 1978 Ruby Award Music Potpourri , Antonio Lopez Fashion Chronicler of 60s thru 1980s, Veronica Lake, Christopher Street doric Wilson Village Playwright ETC

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Angles, diamond in the dark
Xavier; García Muchart, Mireia Roca Domingo
Manufacturer: Editorial Cims 97
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 8484115283

Average customer rating:

Sweet story and interesting throughout

Dark Bt Full Diamonds
Katie Letcher Lyle
Manufacturer: Putnam Juvenile
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Customer Reviews:

Sweet story and interesting throughout.......1997-12-20

A story that doesn't age even if the model on the cover has. I should know...it's me ! A coming-of-age story that will enchant boys as much as girls. A romantic saga.

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Dark Diamond (Birthstone Gothic #4)

Manufacturer: Ballantine
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
ASIN: B000GS9WPA

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DARK DIAMONDS
Mor Jokai
Manufacturer: Corvina
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000GRBAFQ

Book Description

Herbert London's new work "Decade of Denial" places America in the 1990s under the microscope and discovers a country paying a heavy price for the excesses of the past, crippled by the cultural attitudes and rebelliousness of the sixties and seventies. London argues that the baby boomer generation has replaced openness with stealth, and honesty with deceit. Far from mere nostalgic musings for a simpler time, "Decade of Denial" wonderfully captures the zeitgeist of the 1990s from the "dumbing down" of education to the proliferation of crass popular culture. This is an essential book for serious readers of American cultural history seeking to understand the evolution of modern 'manners' and 'morals,' and an indictment of a generation freed from the constraints of virtue.

Customer Reviews:

decade of decline.......2002-12-09

London provides an interesting survey of the 1990s. The decade he paints is one mired in postmodernism and relativism, one that denies that man is imperfect and not perfectible. 90s culture was basically a wasteland, driven mostly by marketability and greed, in which previous conceptions of the family, or of art, or of excellence, were eroded and replaced. "Nothingness" (a la Seinfeld) was celebrated. It was a media-driven era.

London dedicates the majority of his book to education--kindergarten through college. Curricula were turned into mulicultural and postmodern nightmares. Other cultures were to be studied either to the exclusion or outright denigration of the US. Feminist ideas turned physical education classes into "genderless" activity times, instead of rigorous classes in physical exercise and well-being. They also ate away at high school athletics, as girls sought to join football teams. All notions of excellence were fading away, as educators feared offending people or elevating one above another, or insisted that regardless of performance, all were equal somehow.

I personally would have enjoyed a section devoted to government and politics in the 1990s and how they fit in with everything else. Still, from what London has presented here, it's not too difficult, I suppose, to figure out that the transformation of politics (and the Clinton business) are part and parcel of these other trends.

All in all, the book is a solid (and slim) overview of this decade that witnessed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, even as culture and society sank deeper and deeper into the ashbin. The two developments are not entirely unrelated, and in many ways, the trends of the 1990s only continue into 2002.

Book Description

The Internet, with its profusion of information, has made us hungry for ever more, ever better data. Out of necessity, many of us have become pretty adept with search engine queries, but there are times when even the most powerful search engines aren't enough. If you've ever wanted your data in a different form than it's presented, or wanted to collect data from several sites and see it side-by-side without the constraints of a browser, then Spidering Hacks is for you. Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data sources. You'll no longer feel constrained by the way host sites think you want to see their data presented--you'll learn how to scrape and repurpose raw data so you can view in a way that's meaningful to you. Written for developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and power users, Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering concepts, tools (Perl, LWP, out-of-the-box utilities), and ethics (how to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and unacceptable). Next, you'll collect media files and data from databases. Then you'll learn how to interpret and understand the data, repurpose it for use in other applications, and even build authorized interfaces to integrate the data into your own content. By the time you finish Spidering Hacks, you'll be able to:

Aggregate and associate data from disparate locations, then store and manipulate the data as you like
Gain a competitive edge in business by knowing when competitors' products are on sale, and comparing sales ranks and product placement on e-commerce sites
Integrate third-party data into your own applications or web sites
Make your own site easier to scrape and more usable to others
Keep up-to-date with your favorite comics strips, news stories, stock tips, and more without visiting the site every day

Like the other books in O'Reilly's popular Hacks series, Spidering Hacks brings you 100 industrial-strength tips and tools from the experts to help you master this technology. If you're interested in data retrieval of any type, this book provides a wealth of data for finding a wealth of data.

Customer Reviews:

Perl-intensive book on web crawler design.......2006-05-16

A spider (also known as a web crawler or web robot) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This book is about how to create programs that perform the functions of a web crawler, with most of the Hacks being written in Perl. Like the rest of the Hacks series, this book presents 100 bite-sized chunks of code or technique to tackle specific activities. In this book these range from the simple - how to download a set of image files - to the complex - cross-referring the output from one site with another to generate a third set of data. No matter what the complexity, each hack is clearly explained, with the code samples balanced with instructions, examples and notes on how to hack the hack.

As already mentioned, the hacks in this book mostly use Perl, though scattered here and there you'll find some Java, Python and PHP. If you really hate Perl, then you will not like this book. On the other hand the authors assume only a rudimentary knowledge of Perl, and there is no requirement for any knowledge of network programming of any description. After the opening chapter which gives guidance of being a good spidering citizen (how to respect the sites you are taking data from), there is a second chapter which details how to create a spidering toolkit (how to find and install the site of modules that many of the hacks depend on).

With a toolkit in place and a knowledge of good behavior, the book dives into the various hacks that are organized by topic: collecting media files, gleaning data from databases (with many examples for Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, Alexa and other popular information sources), maintaining your collections (more automation with "cron" or other scheduling tools) and a final chapter on giving something back (creating a web service, generating RSS feeds and so on).

The bulk of the hacks are in chapter four, which looks at extracting data from databases. Aside from the obvious sources such as Amazon and Google, these including online banks, tracking FedEx packages and more. There are a range of techniques used to grab and filter the data, so even if a data source you want to use isn't listed, the chances are that one of these hacks can be refactored to do what you want.

If Perl is not your thing then the very light sprinkling of non-Perl hacks probably isn't enough to make this a worthwhile purchase. If you're a Perl hacker interested in spidering there is a ton of stuff for you here without doubt. Also, if you are a student looking for a good supplement on building a web spider from scratch, this is probably not the book for you either, but the various hacks will give you some ideas on what you might want to do in your own spider if you wish to write one in a higher level language such as Java. Amazon does not show the table of contents so I do that here for completeness:

Chapter 1. Walking Softly
1. A Crash Course in Spidering and Scraping
2. Best Practices for You and Your Spider
3. Anatomy of an HTML Page
4. Registering Your Spider
5. Preempting Discovery
6. Keeping Your Spider Out of Sticky Situations
7. Finding the Patterns of Identifiers
Chapter 2. Assembling a Toolbox
Perl Modules
Resources You May Find Helpful
8. Installing Perl Modules
9. Simply Fetching with LWP::Simple
10. More Involved Requests with LWP::UserAgent
11. Adding HTTP Headers to Your Request
12. Posting Form Data with LWP
13. Authentication, Cookies, and Proxies
14. Handling Relative and Absolute URLs
15. Secured Access and Browser Attributes
16. Respecting Your Scrapee's Bandwidth
17. Respecting robots.txt
18. Adding Progress Bars to Your Scripts
19. Scraping with HTML::TreeBuilder
20. Parsing with HTML::TokeParser
21. WWW::Mechanize 101
22. Scraping with WWW::Mechanize
23. In Praise of Regular Expressions
24. Painless RSS with Template::Extract
25. A Quick Introduction to XPath
26. Downloading with curl and wget
27. More Advanced wget Techniques
28. Using Pipes to Chain Commands
29. Running Multiple Utilities at Once
30. Utilizing the Web Scraping Proxy
31. Being Warned When Things Go Wrong
32. Being Adaptive to Site Redesigns
Chapter 3. Collecting Media Files
33. Detective Case Study: Newgrounds
34. Detective Case Study: iFilm
35. Downloading Movies from the Library of Congress
36. Downloading Images from Webshots
37. Downloading Comics with dailystrips
38. Archiving Your Favorite Webcams
39. News Wallpaper for Your Site
40. Saving Only POP3 Email Attachments
41. Downloading MP3s from a Playlist
42. Downloading from Usenet with nget
Chapter 4. Gleaning Data from Databases
43. Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with yahoo2mbox
44. Archiving Yahoo! Groups Messages with WWW::Yahoo::Groups
45. Gleaning Buzz from Yahoo!
46. Spidering the Yahoo! Catalog
47. Tracking Additions to Yahoo!
48. Scattersearch with Yahoo! and Google
49. Yahoo! Directory Mindshare in Google
50. Weblog-Free Google Results
51. Spidering, Google, and Multiple Domains
52. Scraping Amazon.com Product Reviews
53. Receive an Email Alert for Newly Added Amazon.com Reviews
54. Scraping Amazon.com Customer Advice
55. Publishing Amazon.com Associates Statistics
56. Sorting Amazon.com Recommendations by Rating
57. Related Amazon.com Products with Alexa
58. Scraping Alexa's Competitive Data with Java
59. Finding Album Information with FreeDB and Amazon.com
60. Expanding Your Musical Tastes
61. Saving Daily Horoscopes to Your iPod
62. Graphing Data with RRDTOOL
63. Stocking Up on Financial Quotes
64. Super Author Searching
65. Mapping O'Reilly Best Sellers to Library Popularity
66. Using All Consuming to Get Book Lists
67. Tracking Packages with FedEx
68. Checking Blogs for New Comments
69. Aggregating RSS and Posting Changes
70. Using the Link Cosmos of Technorati
71. Finding Related RSS Feeds
72. Automatically Finding Blogs of Interest
73. Scraping TV Listings
74. What's Your Visitor's Weather Like?
75. Trendspotting with Geotargeting
76. Getting the Best Travel Route by Train
77. Geographic Distance and Back Again
78. Super Word Lookup
79. Word Associations with Lexical Freenet
80. Reformatting Bugtraq Reports
81. Keeping Tabs on the Web via Email
82. Publish IE's Favorites to Your Web Site
83. Spidering GameStop.com Game Prices
84. Bargain Hunting with PHP
85. Aggregating Multiple Search Engine Results
86. Robot Karaoke
87. Searching the Better Business Bureau
88. Searching for Health Inspections
89. Filtering for Content
Chapter 5. Maintaining Your Collections
90. Using cron to Automate Tasks
91. Scheduling Tasks Without cron
92. Mirroring Web Sites with wget and rsync
93. Accumulating Search Results Over Time
Chapter 6. Giving Back to the World
94. Using XML::RSS to Repurpose Data
95. Placing RSS Headlines on Your Site
96. Making Your Resources Scrapable with Regular Expressions
97. Making Your Resources Scrapable with a REST Interface
98. Making Your Resources Scrapable with XML-RPC
99. Creating an IM Interface
100. Going Beyond the Book

what is in a name?.......2005-12-30

well, sometimes a generalizing lie.
.
IMHO, this book should have been named "(some) Spidering Hacks using Perl"
.
the "100" and "industrial strength" sale pitches they could have spared from the title as well
.
the very little python and java code that was either mentioned and/or included as code examples I think was as a way to pepper the content and apparently make it more appealing to a broader audience
.
._ the book is mostly about Perl scripts (you could compile Perl to C and then use c2java, for example, but why bothering if, as I noticed right away, it was mostly toy code?) I wonder what the "industrial strength" thing was all about.
There is also some gnu utils examples (wget and curl), from which you could get better examples online
._ the book has "examples" that don't make any sense (to me) and not only that but you could see as a total waste of time, why bothering scraping amazon's pages if they offer SOAP/RSS feeds? And not only that but then he goes on telling you how to scrape a site offering financial stocks info, too!?!?! I would have started by splitting the book in two, cases for which you don't really need scraping at all and those for which you do
._ the author in an attempt to reach the "100" mark, included cases on how to download, say MP3 with Beatles songs and PDF files from IRS sites as separate cases :-? I wonder what the difference is once you have a connection to the data feed?!?
.
there is, "Web Content Mining with Java" ISBN: 047084311X and as you see the publishers/authors named this book after what it is all about and if you want to read about "industrial strength" approaches I would recommend "Mining the Web" ISBN: 1558607544
.
usually "hacks" books are about hacks, meaning you already know your stuff and are learning some hacks. If you know the basics of spiders and how to retrieve data off the Net programmatically this book is not for you. If you, on the other had, are new to this subject and are a Perl programmer you may learn a few things from it
.
otf

Good, but needs more variety of languages.......2004-11-13

Nearly all of the examples were written using Perl, but the few pages written with PHP contained some very useful nuggets!

I especially liked the use of the explode() function to split a table-formatted html report into multiple PHP array elements for individual processing. Now, if only the authors had included examples written for ASP, Cold Fusion, etc. they could have appealed to a much wider audience!

Many examples of how to use spiders.......2004-04-09

The book has a nice collection of case studies on how to gather data from disparate websites. You might consider this as showing a simple way for you to use Web Services.

Spidering is the way that search engines gather their data. But you do not have to be Altavista or Google to use spiders. Nor do you have to be scanning a large fraction of the Web. The authors demistify spiders. If you can follow their examples, then you get concrete instances of usage that might help your particular application.

Thoughtfully, the examples are mostly written in Perl, with a few in Java. These languages should be familiar to many. Though even if you don't know them, the logic of the code can still be useful. (That is, you can treat the code as pseudocode.)

While spiders are probably best known as being used by search engines, they are really only the starting point for the latter. The much harder problems start when you have the data amassed by a spider. Now you have to efficiently find correlations between the various web pages. You should be aware that the book does not discuss these with any significant depth. Not surprising, because these are outside the scope of the book. The examples do show how to use the data found by spiders. But most of these are for web pages that sit in a given domain. So the pages are closely affiliated in content and structure.

Lots of great ideas.......2004-03-23

Once in a long while you get a book that inspires you with a lot of great small ideas. Spidering Hacks is just that type of book. The web has a wealth of structured and semi-structured that is just waiting to be mined with automated tools. This book not only teaches you how to get the data out of these sources, but gives you idea about where to look for information and what to do with it.

This book demonstrates everything I like in a technical book. It not only describes how things are done. It also gives practical examples of how the technology can be useful in the real world, and presents them enthusiastically. It makes you want to go out and implement all of the ideas and to keep on going with some of your own.

Nitpicks I have with the book are minor. The 'Hacks' format seems imposed, for example, hack #8 is about installing CPAN. I don't think that section should be left out, but I don't think it's a hack either. But hey, I don't care that much about the structure as long as it isn't an imposing flaw and the content within the structure is great, as it is with this book.

Have to say, O'Reilly is on a roll with the Hacks series. They have all been fine books.

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