Web Client Programming with Perl: Automating Tasks on the Web (A Nutshell handbook)

If you've ever wanted to learn more about Web protocols so you could build custom client-side tools to automate tasks--or just so you have a better understanding of what's happening behind the scenes--then Web Client Programming with Perl is the book for you. Wong explains HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests and socket calls, then shows how you can use the LWP library for Perl to retrieve Web pages, parse HTML, check whether a server is responding, and more.