I want to make a program or script that reads various numbers at various spots across multiple webpages and performs actions on another page in response to those numbers.
I have almost no programming experience outside Scheme. What should I learn that can do this?
Name:
Anonymous2011-05-21 11:57
Microsoft Visual Basic .Net 2010
Name:
Anonymous2011-05-21 12:00
>>2
This is a good, helpful troll. It is one way of accomplishing your goals.
Ruby, Python, Perl and PHP are other popular languages that have good facilities for doing what you wish. Perl or Ruby are probably the least offensive to your precious functional mind.
It could be done by LWP::UserAgent or LWP::Simple (to get those data) and regular expressions or HTML parser (to extract, what you need). You will probably need also cron, to run your task periodically.
From the other side, as a corporate developer, I would suggest to build a grid of web crawlers, that will fetch those data and pull them in NoSQL database. In second grid would be multiple tiers web service, that could perform computations. Then you will be able to connect by using any thin clients (web browser).