Knowing HTML and the basics of how the Internet works will be necessary for using this book. If you are a beginning programmer with even nominal computer network experience, you’ll be fine. It is important to recognize, however, that this book will not teach you how to program or how TCP/IP, the protocol of the Internet, works.
You don’t need elaborate hardware to start writing webbots. If you have a secondhand computer, you probably have the minimum requirement to play with all the examples in this book. Any of the following hardware is appropriate for using the examples and information in this book:
A personal computer that uses a Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 operating system
Any reasonably modern Linux-, Unix-, or FreeBSD-based computer
A Macintosh running OS X (or later)
It will also prove useful to have ample storage. This is particularly true if your plan is to write spiders, self-directed webbots, which can consume all available resources (especially hard drives) if they are allowed to download too many files.
In an effort to be as relevant as possible, the software examples in this book use PHP,[1] cURL,[2] and MySQL.[3] All of these software technologies are available as free downloads from their respective websites. In addition to being free, these software packages are wonderfully portable and function well on a variety of computers and operating systems.
A connection to the Internet is very handy, but not entirely necessary. If you lack a network connection, you can create your own local intranet (one or more webservers on a private network) by loading Apache[4] onto your computer, and if that’s not possible, you can design programs that use local files as targets. However, neither of these options is as fun as writing webbots that use a live Internet connection. In addition, if you lack an Internet connection, you will not have access to the online resources, which add a lot of value to your learning experience.
[1] See http://www.php.net.
[2] See http://curl.haxx.se.
[3] See http://www.mysql.com.
[4] See http://www.apache.org.