Hacks #43-89

In Chapter 3, you learned techniques for collecting media files. Now you're going to take those lessons and move in a slightly different direction: gleaning data from databases and information collections.

Information collections can be as large and multifaceted as Google's index of the World Wide Web, or as narrow and precise as King County health collections. You can scrape information as general as archives from Yahoo! Groups, or as targeted as game prices from GameStop.com. In this chapter, we'll look at a variety of ways you can access database information, a variety of sources you might want to try (and a few hints for thinking of your own!), and ways that you can combine the power of programming with already-existing web APIs to make new and powerful tools.