O’Reilly is offering a free webcast on March 13, 2012, at 10:00 AM PT on the subject of Developing Webbots and Spiders: Using virtual robots to automate your work. Among the topics to be covered by this one hour presentation by author and DEFCON presenter Michael Schrenk include the basics of building a webbot, considering online property rights, scraping difficult websites, and maintaining stealth, and large-scale deployment of distributed webbots.
You can register for this free webcast by visiting the O’Reilly Community webpage.