A few things that might help newbies.

[Net66 54]

I've had Ubot a week now (so I am still a newbie myself). As I come from a programming and web background it has been a little easier to get my head around what ubot does and how it does it. Having said that I did spend a few hours failing miserably at a fairly simple scrape task on my first day because I had misunderstood something.

 

I thought I'd write up a few tips for learning ubot which might help newbies avoid some of the frustrations that learning something like this can bring.

 

1) Watch ALL the tutorial videos you can. It becomes tempting to skip over videos because you already think you know how to do xyz but it is amazing what little things you pick up that the tutorial may not have set out to teach but get covered anyway.

 

The training videos by Seth that you are linked to in the email when you purchase, the super videos at Aaron Nimocks site http://www.ubottutorials.com and whatever else you can find. I appreciate that many of these videos run to 45+ mins but its a wise time investment to watch even the videos that cover things you don't think you need to know.

 

2) Always remember "there's more than one way to skin a cat". If something really isn't working as you thought see if you can come up with an alternative method and try that. I find it useful to open the site I am working with in an ordinary browser and see how it behaves, etc. Often right clicking and opening in a new window in a regular browser will give you some useful clues about where something is navigating to.

 

3) Make your first bot attempts fairly simple. My first full bot scraped a friend list on a site that had very basic navigation (no ajax, etc) and then used the private message system to message each of them with a random pause between messages.

 

4) Download and look at as many sample bits of bot code as you can. Looking at bots that have been written by experienced ubotters will give you ideas on the best ways to lay out a bot. Aaron Nimocks bots are nicely structured and kept looking tidy by splitting parts of the bot into subs.

 

5) Keep notes! Whenever you come across a good part in a video or a nice example piece of code make a note of where you saw it, where in the video it was, etc. This makes referencing back to things much quicker.

 

6) If you are learning ubot for the first time I'd stick with the official stable release rather than the beta so you don't get stuck because of a bug. Also you won't end up reporting things as bugs that are really user error from being so new to ubot.

 

7) If you really can't solve something try taking a break. So many times I have spent hours looking for a problem in a program or script, finally taken a break, come back and spotted the problem right away. This doesn't just apply to ubot its good practise with any kind of scripting or programming.

 

Above all... have fun with it and don't get discouraged if it takes you a while to figure this out - stick with it and you'll soon be turning out killer bots in record time.

 

I hope this helps someone.

 

Andy

[alcr 135]

Great stuff!

[Big Jay 35]

+1