I like to think that this book is for everyone. But since that's a bit of an exaggeration, let's try to identify who might really enjoy this book. This book is for software developers who want to expand into a new market niche. This book is for web administrators who maintain large amounts of data. Administrators can replace manual maintenance tasks with web robots to detect and correct problems with web sites.
Robots perform tasks more accurately and quickly than human hands.
But to be honest, the audience that's closest to my heart is that of computer enthusiasts, tinkerers, and motivated students, who can use this book to satisfy their curiosity about how the Web works and how to make it work for them. My editor often talks about when she first learned UNIX scripting and how it opened a world of automation for her. When you learn how to write scripts, you realize that there's very little that you can't do within that universe. With this book, you can extend that confidence to the Web. Unfortunately, we can't teach you everything.