Web Client Programming with Perl Automating Tasks on the Web By Clinton Wong 1st Edition March 1997 This book is out of print, but it has been made available online through the O'Reilly Open Books Project.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction
     Why Write Your Own Clients?
     The Web and HTTP
     The Programming Interface
     A Word of Caution

2. Demystifying the Browser
     Behind the Scenes of a Simple Document
     Retrieving a Document Manually
     Behind the Scenes of an HTML Form
     Behind the Scenes of Publishing a Document
     Structure of HTTP Transactions

3. Learning HTTP
     Structure of an HTTP Transaction
     Client Request Methods
     Versions of HTTP
     Server Response Codes
     HTTP Headers

4. The Socket Library
     A Typical Conversation over Sockets
     Using the Socket Calls
     Server Socket Calls
     Client Connection Code
     Your First Web Client
     Parsing a URL
     Hypertext UNIX cat
     Shell Hypertext cat
     Grep out URL References
     Client Design Considerations

5. The LWP Library
     Some Simple Examples
     Listing of LWP Modules
     Using LWP

6. Example LWP Programs
     Simple Clients
     Periodic Clients
     Recursive Clients

7. Graphical Examples with Perl/Tk
     A Brief Introduction to Tk
     A Dictionary Client: xword
     Check on Package Delivery: Track
     Check if Servers Are up: webping

A. HTTP Headers
     General Headers
     Client Request Headers
     Server Response Headers
     Entity Headers
     Summary of Support Across HTTP Versions

B. Reference Tables
     Media Types
     Character Encoding
     Languages
     Character Sets

C. The Robot Exclusion Standard

Index

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