Perl soared to popularity as a language for creating and managing web content, but with LWP (Library for WWW in Perl), Perl is equally adept at consuming information on the Web. LWP is a suite of modules for fetching and processing web pages. The Web is a vast data source that contains everything from stock prices to movie credits, and with LWP all that data is just a few lines of code away. Anything you do on the Web, whether it's buying or selling, reading or writing, uploading or downloading, for e-commerce or recreation, can be controlled with Perl and LWP. You can automate web-based purchase orders as easily as you can set up a program to download MP3 files from a web site.
Sean M. Burke Boeken
