Thanking Morbus and Bad Influence for the chuckles,
[...] - what I think /should/ dissuade people is the book's age, and more particularly, the book's topic. Spidering and scraping, by their nature, require ever-evolving scripts, and while I tried to show various techniques throughout the book - techniques that would help people write and modify the scripts on their own - I suspect a good portion of the included scripts are no longer usable. The web just changes too much for a spidering/scraping script published/written a year and a half ago to work verbatim without modification. As such, anyone hoping to buy the book and get 80 out-of-the-page scripts is going to have a bit of unexpected work cut out for them.
So, Kevin, since age is an implicit problem with hacks, will there by any chance be something along the lines of a web site tracking the utility of the scripts and maybe containing suggestions and code for updating them? Maybe it could be set up to allow readers like Lola to post their notes?
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Joel Rees
Nothing to say today
so I'll say nothing:
Nothing.