Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers (http://www.schrenk.com/nostarch/webbots/index.

php

  was recently released, I read through it, it's fairly good.

It's a good introduction to cURL and scraping.  If you're a

PHP

  guy and are completely new to scraping this would be a good book, it has a set of libraries that make things easier, also helps you

learn

  how to extract information out of a web page and do stuff with it.  The chapters take you through the commands, putting them together into the author's library, and then some minor projects to make use of them.  It also has some chapters on integrating with POP/NNTP/SMTP which may or may not be interesting to you.

If you're a

Perl

  guy and have an understanding of WWW::Mechanize or LWP you might find this a bit primitive, especially if you've done work with HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML::TokeParser.  In that case, O'Reilly's "LWP &

Perl

 "  would be a better bet to

learn

  the advanced ways of scraping with TreeBuilder and TokeParser.  "Spidering Hacks" is another good one, it's a lot lighter on the technical stuff but has a lot of good information and examples to work from, especially using WWW::Mechanize.

Fatty

cool

I bought it, I'm a sucker. 

Review please!