Introduction

• Understanding the Structure of Surfing
• Using the HTTP Recipes Web Site
• Understanding HTTP Requests

    This book shows how to create HTTP programs in C#. Though the code presented is targeted at C#, the examples could easily be translated to any of the other .Net languages, such as Visual Basic .Net. HTTP programming allows programs to be constructed that send and retrieve information from web sites in much the same way as a human user surfs the web. These programs are called bots. This book presents many useful recipes for commonly performed HTTP programming tasks. Using these recipes a wide array of bots can be constructed.

    To create HTTP programs with C# an understanding of the structure of HTTP requests is required. This chapter introduces this structure. Understanding this structure allows the programmer to create programs that surf the web just as a user does.