The book is very helpful if you need to setup a Perl
script to access a web site. It will get you going with
the issue of using sockets to communicate and using http
to send requests. There is also an example of a script
to check a web site for broken links.

I am not an expert on sockets, but I have found that even
with Perl, there are likely to be problems on various
platforms. There is only one brief mention which suggests
that this book is not very applicable to Wintel programming
because LWP (Library for WWW access in Perl) is not
available. I think it now is available. Can we have a
web update on this? Are there ways around this?
Can the examples be run on various flavors of Unix such
as SRV, BSD and Linux? What happens to various examples
when the server turns out to be a non-Unix box?

The examples could be translated into other languages
such as Java and C/C++ with varying amounts of difficulty
depending on what you wanted to do with sockets and
regular expressions. A brief discussion of this could
help broaden the appeal of this book.

It would be helpful if O'Reilly would publish the examples
for downloading and add an errata file such as a previous
reader commented. Other O'Reilly books have these files.
Actually, there is an examples file at
ftp://ftp.ora.com/published/oreilly/nutshell/web-client/
but it is not available or mentioned on the O'Reilly web
pages.

One bug: A Perl subroutine/function is correctly written
in an example as (say) "getopts('hHrd');" but in the text
is called "Getopts()". The difference between g and G is
significant.

Overall, despite these minor complaints, the book saved me
a lot of time which saved a project for a client.