Chapter 5. INTERNET DATA MINING

The Internet is one of the greatest information sources in the world. There are a couple of ways of getting information from the Internet. One way is to visit web pages. You'll need a very large program called a browser to do this.^[*] You'll have to get the entire web page, including information you probably don't want or need (advertisements, for example). And it's difficult to do anything with the data once you get it.

^[*] If you're using Windows, you'll need a very large, very bloated, and very buggy program called a browser unless you'll willing to go to the trouble of replacing the default Windows browser.

On the other hand, Perl is ideal for grabbing web pages, munching them up, and spitting out what you want. So with a little Perl magic, you can actually extract useful information from the Web.