I'm sorry, I should have specified my question further. The book is meant to be a Perl programming book, and I'm particularly interested in solutions that other people have obtained in Perl. This means that, among other things, I'm looking for suggestions of (e.g.) CPAN modules that might help out along these lines. A few are pretty obvious -- LWP, WWW::Mechanize come to mind. But there are no doubt goodies lurking in CPAN that could be helpful but that I would not know. Also, there might be creative or novel uses of other modules out there that could apply to this problem domain. (e.g. HTML::* modules for the construction of a tree that can be traveled, depending on node contents)

You are correct that programmers of other languages aren't likely to have different classes of problems in this domain than Perl programmers. But I am interested in getting a wider view of the domain, especially as Perl programmers have approached it, including specific examples of Perl technology applied to those problems.

Cheers,
Richard