Book Description
A comprehensive volume spanning the entire theory course, HARMONY AND VOICE LEADING begins with coverage of basic concepts of theory and harmony, and moves into coverage of advanced dissonance and chromaticism. It emphasizes the linear aspects of music as much as the harmonic, and introduces large-scale progressions--linear and harmonic--at an early stage. The first three Units of the book are designed to be taught sequentially, but instructors have the flexibility to teach the latter units in any combination and order they choose.
Customer Reviews:
Solid common practice period theory text.......2005-09-25
I've yet to find an alternative to the Roger Sessions, HARMONIC PRACTICE, which I believe to be the best theory text ever written. However, the teaching of theory has changed over the past forty years since my first "date" with Sessions and his text... and students have changed as well. Hence, I find Messrs Schachter & Aldwell have done a commendable job (a nearly impossible job, I think) in writing this new, single volume edition. Whilst I never expect to find the perfect text, this one will do nicely.
The text clearly cannot stand apart from a good theory teacher. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), a credible do-it-yourself theory text has yet to be written.
Important text, but not for beginners.......2004-12-20
One thing to understand about this book - it was not written with amazon.com beginners in mind. It is a college-level theory textbook, and is probably one of the few books that present basic theory concepts in a coherent, unified fashion. The "restrictions" some reviewers complain about, are actually part of a time-honored approach to teaching theory (think "species counterpoint"). To understand the book, a teacher needs to understand something of the ideas and approach of Heinrich Schenker (Schachter was one of Schenker's students). Unlike many theory books, which are into quick summaries and labels, this book is based on a deep understanding of how western tonal music works (at least from the Schenkerian perspective). Even basic concepts like scale degrees, intervals, and triads, are presented in such a way that important relationships among tones become evident. Chords are not merely chunks of notes that deserve a label, but are part of a larger, contrapuntal whole. Sticking with the early chapters, and especially getting a good grasp of the contrapuntal nature of even the most basic chords (insights gained into the similar "passing chord" functions of the V4/3 and viio6 chords, for example) are well worth the effort. Upon successful completion of the first 10 or 11 chapters, a student should have a new understanding of how tonal music works.
A very strong text teaching the foundations of tonal music.......2004-05-19
When I was a student at the University of Michigan School of Music in the late seventies and early eighties, we used the then brand new first edition of this book. I thought it was quite good then, and I believe this third edition to be an even better book. It treats the subjects of tonal harmony and voice leading quite well. There have been some solid improvements in the way a few things are explained and some changes in the musical examples. However, it is still fundamentally the same sound course for undergraduate music theory it has been since 1978. However, it now comes in one volume instead of the two volumes of the first edition.
The text begins with a quick review of the basics of musical grammar, a brief introduction of the rudiments of musical notation, intervals, rhythm (and meter), chords, and four-part harmony. Part II talks about the powerful relationship between the tonic and dominant chords, chord progressions elaborating that relationship, and even the dominant as a key area (whether you call it tonicization or modulation is up to you). Part III discusses the implications of root position, first inversion, and second inversion chords in elaborating harmonies and in sequences. Part IV is actually about contrapuntal issues, but is framed in a discussion of melodic figuration. Part V introduces chromaticism, modal mixture, and extends the discussion on uses of seventh chords. Part VI extends the discussion of chromaticism and includes ninth and eleventh chords, Phrygian II (Neapolitan chords), augmented sixths, and more types of mixture. There is also important discussion of the implications all this has for voice leading and modulation to other key areas.
Some might wish that it contained some treatments of graphical (Schenkerian notation), and I am one of them, but that is a quibble compared to this book's many strengths. The counter argument is that until the students really have a handle on the basics of harmony and how voice leading is handled through the music of the early twentieth century, there really isn't a way for them to grasp the meaning of the larger structures Schenker's graphical notation was created to represent. I think that is a fair point, but still think there are some basics in notation that could be introduced early in the process when talking about the basic structure of melodies and supporting harmonies and candential formulas.
The explanations are clear and the musical examples apt. In fact, someone could actually work through this book on his own and grasp what is being presented. Of course, an instructor is helpful to check work and explain things that remain unclear in the student's mind, but that is really true for any book on any subject.
There are some wonderful materials to supplement this text. The most important are the two work books (WB I - ISBN 0-15-506226-3 / WB II - ISBN 0-15-506234-4. They are useful exercises that help the student learn the material by actively working through the application of the materials discussed.
Another resource that should not be overlooked is the two-CD set (ISBN 0-534-52216-5) that contains performances of the hundreds of musical examples in the textbook (not the workbooks). It can really help a student to listen to examples that are unclear. If a student can play them herself or hear them in his head, so much the better, but these discs can enrich reading through the textbook and making sure that you understand what is being presented to you.
Kudos to Professors Aldwell and Schachter for this wonderful text and supporting materials.
Good, but don't expect it to cover everything.......2003-11-01
The main reason that I want to write a review here is on the off-chance that any AP music theory teachers or students are coming across this and are considering buying the book. My teacher made the mistake of using this as our primary textbook for the year, hoping that it would cover the AP curriculum. Well, it doesn't. It only helps on about 20% of the test, and for the rest you will be dead in the water.
That said, it does a pretty good job introducing and expanding the concept of basic four-part voice leading. It doesn't expend very many pages teaching the absolute basics like major and minor chords, so it helps to approach the book with some understanding of chords, intervals, and the like.
The progressions and rules that it allows do seem a little bit stringent and antiquated considering the many changes in classical music over the past century, but at least you can voice-lead like Bach after reading this!
Be Warned!.......2003-10-24
This is not a paperback edition of the textbook but rather Workbook I which accompanies the hardcover textbook. I made the mistake of ordering this thinking it was the textbook.
What amazon.ca is calling the 'Workbook' is actually Workbook II, covering the later chapters of the textbook.
Buyer beware!
Product Description
Volume 2 of a textbook dealing with tonal organization in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both in content and in method it offers a new approach to the teaching of harmony. Contents are: Chapter IV Elements of Figuration, Chapter V Advance Tonal Procedures, Chapter VI Chromaticism,
Customer Reviews:
harmony?.......2007-01-03
Would someone please list each if these Books, Workbooks and CDs in relation to each other so the WHOLE can be seen? I have happily used the Hardcover H & V 1, pub in l978; as it seemed useful, recently purchased the H&V 3rd ed, to find it is a 2 CD set, yet there is a good deal of crossover use for CD #1 to the H&V volume #1; to what study book does CD #2 refer? to what does the 'workbook' refer? Unless there are some printed answers available, there is truly no use to a 'workbook', because you'll never know where you went wrong; even teachers may disagree on the 'rules'. Why can't they make a straightforward offering of these materials?
Buyer Beware!.......2003-10-24
This is actually Workbook II which accompanies the textbook of Harmony and Voice Leading. Workbook I is simply under the description of 'Harmony and Voice Leading' (Paperback).
Make sure you order what you want!
Useful practice questions but alas no answers included........1999-11-19
This workbook presents very practical theory and voice leading problems in order to help you practice the theories outlined in the textbook, unfortunately there are no answers contained in the workbook. Unless you have someone who can correct your work it is not a particularly useful book- especially if you are working on your own.
Average customer rating:
- music theory made accessible
- music theory made accessible
|
Harmony and Voice Leading (Harpercollins College Outline Series)
Edgar W. Williams
Manufacturer: Perennial
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Customer Reviews:
music theory made accessible.......2001-08-16
I have borrowed this excellent book from the public library numerous times and read it from cover to cover. Of all the music theory books in the library this was the most useful to me. Others were either elementary or so highly technical I could not get through them. Two features particularly contribute to this book's appeal. First, the author's writing style is very readable--concise and logical with each concept discussed relative to a brief musical example (mostly Bach and Mozart). Second, the musical examples are annotated with figured bass style chord indications. It was a thrill to learn to read figured bass rather fluently by reading the book and to see how the author's point about the musical examples jumps out when the figured bass notation is used. Bravo!
music theory made accessible.......2001-08-16
I have borrowed this excellent book from the public library numerous times and read it from cover to cover. Of all the music theory books in the library this was the most useful to me. Others were either elementary or so highly technical I could not get through them. Two features particularly contribute to this book's appeal. First, the author's writing style is very readable--concise and logical with each concept discussed relative to a brief musical example (mostly Bach and Mozart). Second, the musical examples are annotated with figured bass style chord indications. It was a thrill to learn to read figured bass rather fluently by reading the book and to see how the author's point about the musical examples jumps out when the figured bass notation is used. Bravo!
Book Description
This important book traces the depiction of biological science in literature, film, and journalism from Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein to Spielberg`s Jurassic Park, exploring how familiar representation of scientific progress has influenced the public perception of it. Jon Turney calls for new stories that will help us view the innovations of the biotechnological age from a more positive perspective.
Customer Reviews:
not bad; but certainly not great, either........1999-03-27
This was an interesting book. It tried to give you the entire history of frankenstein. This means how it afects you in every way since it was written. A nice idea, but not well written. It is long and a little boring. It is also repetitive. It reads more like a phone book, than a non-fiction literary work. I was not pleased at all. In fact, I would not purchase anything else by this author(Mr. Jon Turney) ever again. I thought he could have been a lot more interesting and exciting, if he had really tried.
Average customer rating:
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The Bridge player's bedside book
George F Hervey
Manufacturer: faber and faber
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Binding: Unknown Binding
Bridge
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| Puzzles & Games
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General
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ASIN: B0007JJQAO |
Average customer rating:
- Honest Assessment of Burke's Perl & LWP
- A Wonderful Book
- This book can teach you expert-level web scraping/munging.
- Great book!
- Terrible, bug-infested book...
|
Perl & LWP
Sean M. Burke
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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Spidering Hacks
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ASIN: 0596001789 |
Amazon.com
Perl & LWP sets out to unwrap the Library for the Web in Perl (LWP), which is a collection of modules that make it easier to access and pick apart Web pages (and FTP-accessible files, and outgoing e-mail messages) from within your Perl programs. The book succeeds wonderfully, not only in conveying the technical aspects of LWP programming, but in making clear the fun of doing work that's very well suited to Perl. Sean Burke assumes that his readers know something about Perl, albeit not much, and a similar amount about HTML. He does a great job of explaining how LWP functions fit into Perl programs, and how you can use them to make reference to Internet resources far more easily than before.
Burke's narrative takes the form of a guided tour in which he introduces his readers to aspects of the LWP modules one by one. His tone is generally straightforward (sharp commentary alternates with brief code listings, with occasional passages of reference material), but there's sometimes an undercurrent of exuberance that makes the reader want to get going with his or her own programming right away. Overall, the emphasis is on teaching both LWP and Perl itself to the extent necessary to do LWP work. Because of the concise and nicely indexed code modules, though, you'll find this book useful as a reference after you're under way with LWP. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to program with LWP and Perl itself. All of LWP's strong points--including HTML parsing (with tokens and trees as well as with regular expressions), HTML generation and modification, manipulation of HTML forms, and the operation of spiders--are covered. This book has more of a tutorial tone than any similar reference material on the Internet.
Book Description
Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages. The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, news to e-commerce, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate Web-based purchase orders as easily as you can set up a program to download MP3 files from a web site. Perl & LWP covers:
- Understanding LWP and its design
- Fetching and analyzing URLs
- Extracting information from HTML using regular expressions and tokens
- Working with the structure of HTML documents using trees
- Setting and inspecting HTTP headers and response codes
- Managing cookies
- Accessing information that requires authentication
- Extracting links
- Cooperating with proxy caches
- Writing web spiders (also known as robots) in a safe fashion
Perl & LWP includes many step-by-step examples that show how to apply the various techniques. Programs to extract information from the web sites of BBC News, Altavista, ABEBooks.com, and the Weather Underground, to name just a few, are explained in detail, so that you understand how and why they work. Perl programmers who want to automate and mine the web can pick up this book and be immediately productive. Written by a contributor to LWP, and with a foreword by one of LWP's creators, Perl & LWP is the authoritative guide to this powerful and popular toolkit.
Customer Reviews:
Honest Assessment of Burke's Perl & LWP.......2007-07-13
This is not your typical clunker with endless pages of filler material. It gets right to the point. If you want to learn about using Perl to interact with the internet, this would be a good book to help you get there. I have purchased several Perl books that supposedly teach you how to write code for use with the internet, but they are difficult to understand, and most of the examples just don't work. This book is an exception to that trend. It is the only one I have found so far that has useable, workable examples. The subject matter is still challenging, but Burke is able to explain it enough to give you a clue. If you are looking for help in handling HTTP programmatically, then here is your book.
A Wonderful Book.......2006-08-18
I bought this book to get information automatically on japanese stocks(for example, charts, price, volume, PER, PBR, ROE, ROA, News, messages on Yahoo! Japan BBS for stocks) from the WEB every day.
Somehow this book has not yet translated into Japanese language.
I think this book would sell very well if translated into Japanese. Many demands.
This book is self-contained about the WEB, so you need little Perl programming rules and don't have to have knowledge on the Internet Protocols(HTTP) at all.
In most cases, all you need to do is to modify an example program on this book for your use very little.
This book can teach you expert-level web scraping/munging........2003-07-12
If you aren't yet comfortable using object-oriented Perl modules, the multitude of examples will at least allow you see how it's done even if you're a bit fuzzy on what's happening 'underneath' when you call object methods. If you're comfortable learning how to do something without knowing exactly why it works, then the author's clear step-by-step explantions and numerous progressively more powerful examples should make this book accessible even to relatively innexperienced Perl programmers.
More experienced programmers will understand better why things work, but any Perl programmer will set this book down feeling empowered to turn the web into their own valet. No longer do you need to check multiple sites looking for interesting information. Instead, you can readily author code to do that for you and alert you when items of interest are found. You can use these tools to free up personal time, to harvest information to inform business decisions, to automate tedious web application testing, and a zillion other things.
The author's clear exploration of the relevant Perl modules leaves the reader with a good depth of understanding of what these modules do, when you might want to use which module, and how to use them for real world tasks. Before reading the book, I knew of these modules, but they were a rather intimidating pile. I'd used a few of them on occasion for rather limited projects, but was reluctant to invest the time required to read all of the documentation from the whole collection. Mountains of method-level documentation do not a tutorial make. This book takes all of that information, selects the most important parts, and ensures that those parts are covered in progressively more powerful and/or flexible examples.
If you know Perl and you're sick of 'working the web' to get information and you want the web to work for you instead, then you need this book. I had a personal project that was on the back burner for a couple of years because it just sounded too hard. The weekend after I finished this book, I wrote what I had previously thought to be the hard part of that project and it was both easy and fun. This book makes hard things not just possible, but actually easy.
-matt
Great book!.......2003-03-16
If you are unfamiliar with LWP and web scraping, or HTML parsing using tokens and trees, I strongly recommend this book. It's the best *introduction* to these topics I've been able to find. Sean's style is clear and concise-just what I expect from an O'Reilly book.
To get the most out of this book, you'll want to be familiar with Object Oriented programming in Perl, because (with the exception of LWP::Simple) all the modules discussed in this book use objects.
Also, don't expect the LWP sample code in the book to work correctly. Many of the sites that the scripts try to "scrape" have changed their layout since this book was published, braking the scripts. This isn't a problem though, because the samples Sean provides are very short and clear, so it's not necessary to run them in order to figure out how they work.
Terrible, bug-infested book..........2002-11-06
I really don't know how the previous 5 reviews gave this book 5 stars. I was really excited about this book when I first read the reviews, and now here I am only a few chapters in and already thinking about dumping it altogether. This book has so many flaws for its size, the biggest of which was the codes. I am no Perl expert, but could find my way around in a decent size program. However, no examples I have tried so far in the book actually worked, and some of these are just 10-20 lines long. I am completely new to LWP, I guess like anyone who would buy this book, so it's hard for me to see what the author is doing. The explanation of the code didn't help much either. As oppose to explaining the steps, he just said "the code below does this". And it's pretty obvious little or no editing has gone into this book. If you do buy this book, you'll probably want to make a trip to the Errata page at the Oreilly website. The amount of typos, printing errors, warnings and grammatical mistakes found by readers and editors listed on this page rivals the usuable content of the book itself. You know what, I have spent way too much on this book already.....
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?!?
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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
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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
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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.
Books:
- How Musical Is Man? (Jessie and John Danz Lectures)
- How to Pitch and Promote Your Songs
- Imaginary Men
- Introduction to Guitar Tone and Effects: A Manual for Getting the Sounds from Electric Guitars, Amplifiers, Effects Pedals and Processors
- iPod & iTunes: Missing Manual, Second Edition
- Jimi Hendrix: The Man, the Magic, the Truth
- John Mayer Room For Squares (Guitar TAB)
- Jumpin' Jim's Gone Hawaiian
- Kids' Broadway Songbook (Book/CD) (Vocal Collection)
- KISS and Make-up
Books Index
Books Home
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Workbook: Harmony and Voice Leading, Volume 2
Counterpoint in Composition
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