Books on Screen Scraping with PHP

There are a few books that worth reading if you are serious to learn how to write screen scrapers or webbots using PHP/cURL. Of course you can also find lots of information from internet, such as Stack Overflow, GitHub etc...

Currently I have few books on screen scraping and there are three that using PHP/cURL programming. I highly recommend these three books to those who want to learn screen scraping using PHP/cURL.

Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers - Written by Michael Schrenk

Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers - Written by Michael Schrenk. This book is in second edition now. I found the Chinese version, first edition this book in Chinese language at Kinokuniya book store in late 2010. It was timely as I was looking for practical examples of how to write programming code for screen scrapers. 

The book covers many aspects of screen scraping, from fundamental concept to advanced technique, from technical to legal aspect, various types of application, limitation etc. I used the library functions in PHP provided by this book to perform screen scraping. The library functions was written in procedural programming, best book for those who is new to screen scraper with some knowledge in PHP.

Web Scraping for PHP Developers - Written by Sameer Borate

Web Scraping for PHP Developers - Written by Sameer Borate and just released in mid July 2013. The author uses PHP/cURL to request web page source file from server, then using Simple HTML DOM to perform scraping. The book also discuss authentication with PHP/cURL, scraping using regular expression and PhantomJS. Practical examples on screen scraping are provided at Cookbook section.

Instant PHP Web Scraping - Written by Jacob Ward and also just released in July 2013. The technique is also using PHP/cURL to request web page source file from server then scraping elements using XPath.

Instant PHP Web Scraping - Written by Jacob Ward

 Have fun reading!

Last modified on Tuesday, 15 March 2016 02:03
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