Book recommendations for automation

[pfgannon]

I've decided to head to Borders after work today and pick up a book or two so I can start improving the automation of my sites.

I'm interested in scraping, creating sites on the fly including automated database creation, script installation etc, tracking/analytics, and content creation.

I'm very much a beginner in php so I obviously need to improve on my php skills, so any books you recommend on php would be great.

I also assume I need to learn curl and javascript? Correct me if I'm wrong. Any books on these 2 would be great as well.

And yes I know I could learn most of this online for free, but I learn better from books for some reason. But any links would be appreciated as well.

 

[comatose]

I dont think you're going to find anything like that in a bookstore. Ive never seen it anyway..

 

[pfgannon]

I'm not really looking for books written completely on automation, just books covering the languages.

 

[shaggz]

I'd go to amazon and search for some books that cover the various subjects you are interested in. Since programming books can vary in skill level, detail, and audience, you should try to read the reviews to find the ones that you feel you can relate to.

In terms of automation of a web process, the subject matter you need to focus on is:

php - the base code to drive your process
curl - the library to make the http calls to snag your content
regular expressions - the pattern matching language you will use to identify and extract the target content
mysql - the database you will use to store your scraped content for quick access

 

[JeremyTang]

If you already have programming experience, I would recommend those Orielly books (php in a nutshell); they are very concise.

Otherwise, if you're new to programming in general, it turns out php is really similar to C, so you can also read books on C programming which will teach you fundamental program flow.

Regular expressions are very useful for parsing strings (string matching); and you'll find them in places such as the .htaccess file for ModRewrites. They allow you to do things like convert any server request from:

http://www.yourdomain.com/abc123.htm
to
http://www.yourdomain.com/abc.php?pid=123

etc. You can use your imagination. It's good for cloaking links. For regular expressions I use a tool called regExBuddy to help design and learn more about regular expressions.