iisaphd has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I was wondering if you could create a program using LWP that could manage a perl account by creating a user-agent and having it download my bookshelf. For example, when the program finds a book that could be returned to the bookshelf I would like for it to email me a reminder.

To date, I am getting 0 length responses from oreilly.com although the program seems to work virtually everywhere else I have tried. I am wondering if there is a problem with the way I have set up the user agent or cookies that is causing oreilly to reject me.

If anyone has performed such a task, could you get in touch with me at matt@caitlain.com

Thanks.

Edit by tye, title, unhide paragraphs

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
•Re: Safari
by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 23, 2003 at 19:39 UTC
    It's not clear to me whether you are respecting your Terms of Use:
    {You may ...} download and store sections of a book's contents onto your hard drive or other storage device for your use only for as long as that book remains available under your current subscription or the subscription of the third-party sponsoring your account, whereafter any content copied from Safari must be deleted or destroyed once the title is no longer in your subscription or you no longer have a subscription
    and
    {You agree ...} not to use "Web spiders" or any other automated retrieval mechanisms when using the Service other than what is provided by the Service
    I would hate to think that I'd be helping you violate that agreement, especially since that might damage the only organization to send me a check consistently over the past decade.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
    Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[reply]

      The way I read it he just wants to download the list of books that are currently on his bookshelf, to be notified when the 30 day minimum for a book expires, so that it can be traded for another book. I don't see anywhere in the message that says he wants to download the books themselves.

      That being said, since there isn't any code, all I can say is yes, it is possible, try WWW::Mechanize.

      We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!
[reply]
[reply]
        You're exactly right. I had previously solved the problem rather inelegantly and just wanted to learn some new perl skills (specifically LWP). However, your suggestion to use Mechanize was right on target.

        If the Oreilly people don't like the idea, then I won't post the final code. Otherwise I'll post it here. All in all, Mechanize solved the problem very easily. I'll probably do some research to see why my LWP code failed.

        Thanks for the help

[reply]
Re: LWP to help manage O'Reilly's Safari ?
by dug (Chaplain) on Apr 23, 2003 at 22:01 UTC
    I would recommend contacting the folks at O'Reilly to see if what you are doing is in compliance with their Terms of Service. They have a contact page here, I imagine this is a "General Inquiry".

    Once you can show that the good folks at ORA think what you are doing is okay, post the code that's giving you troubles.

    -- dug
[reply]

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