Review: Data scraping for fun and profit
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 20, 2013
According to the author, the book is intended to describe the use of tools that can be used in your web marketing, particularly for marketing Amazon Kindle books. He calls the Amazon marketplace the "Amazon Jungle" - a place that's very mysterious, dangerous, and difficult to survive.The book includes several tools for automating many processes using high tech tools. The first of these, "Live HTTP Headers," is a web conversation interceptor, a free Firefox add-on. That sounds complicated, but it's just a tool to observe your browser's "conversation" with a web server.The next tool is another Firefox add-on called "iMacro" that lets you record, save, and playback macros that you create. (Didn't the early versions of Windows include a macro recorder?)  This can be used to automate many tasks. Another automated marketing tool is "uBot," which may enable your scripts to sneak past CAPTCHA gatekeepers."Jingling" software may be the most powerful bot traffic generator for increasing page counts at sites such as eBay and YouTube. It's in Chinese, but the book walks you through using it.Two comments about the book:1. It's fairly technical, but the author explains every step with illustrations and commentary.2. There are ethical issues involved (such as sending bots to vote hundreds of times for your book or photograph in a competition), but to his credit, the author acknowledges this and discusses the issues.It's a very informative book with a boatload of information for anyone interested in automating some computer tasks.