Sean Burke is an active member in the Perl community and one of CPAN's most prolific module authors. He has been a columnist for The Perl Journal since 1998, and is an authority on markup languages. Trained as a linguist, he also develops tools for software internationalization and Native language preservation.

• Foreword Preface 1. Introduction to Web Automation The Web as Data Source History of LWP Installing LWP Words of Caution LWP in Action 2. Web Basics URLs An HTTP Transaction LWP::Simple Fetching Documents Without LWP::Simple Example: AltaVista HTTP POST Example: Babelfish 3. The LWP Class Model The Basic Classes Programming with LWP Classes Inside the do_GET and do_POST Functions User Agents HTTP::Response Objects LWP Classes: Behind the Scenes 4. URLs Parsing URLs Relative URLs Converting Absolute URLs to Relative Converting Relative URLs to Absolute 5. Forms Elements of an HTML Form LWP and GET Requests Automating Form Analysis Idiosyncrasies of HTML Forms POST Example: License Plates POST Example: ABEBooks.com File Uploads Limits on Forms 6. Simple HTML Processing with Regular Expressions Automating Data Extraction Regular Expression Techniques Troubleshooting When Regular Expressions Aren't Enough Example: Extracting Links from a Bookmark File Example: Extracting Links from Arbitrary HTML Example: Extracting Temperatures from Weather Underground 7. HTML Processing with Tokens HTML as Tokens Basic HTML::TokeParser Use Individual Tokens Token Sequences More HTML::TokeParser Methods Using Extracted Text 8. Tokenizing Walkthrough The Problem Getting the Data Inspecting the HTML First Code Narrowing In Rewrite for Features Alternatives 9. HTML Processing with Trees Introduction to Trees HTML::TreeBuilder Processing Example: BBC News Example: Fresh Air 10. Modifying HTML with Trees Changing Attributes Deleting Images Detaching and Reattaching Attaching in Another Tree Creating New Elements 11. Cookies, Authentication, and Advanced Requests Cookies Adding Extra Request Header Lines Authentication An HTTP Authentication Example: The Unicode Mailing Archive 12. Spiders Types of Web-Querying Programs A User Agent for Robots Example: A Link-Checking Spider Ideas for Further Expansion A. LWP Modules B. HTTP Status Codes C. Common MIME Types D. Language Tags E. Common Content Encodings F. ASCII Table G. User's View of Object-Oriented Modules Index