What web scraping tool is the best to extract data?

I am writing a program to extract data about which friend is online from a facebook page?

• i am working on a small project for fun okay here's the deal.. i want to write a computer program which may be add-on of some browser may be chrome or firefox or may be a desktop application (windows) what i want this program to do is to login into my facebook profile , extract information about which friend is online ( may be by web scraping techniques or the facebook API if it provides one) say every 5 minutes. like time tracking store this data in an appropriate file. now i don't have any idea where to start , how difficult is it or even possible or not. i have experience in programming in c,c++ and java but i am not familiar with web design. i am quite good at learning new things. so i what i want to know is that where do i start , what are things i will have to take care of, what will i have to learn

• Answer:

  One thing you will have to learn is JavaScript and HTML. Best books out there located in most libraries are Sam's Teach Yourself in 24 hours on these. I've learned JavaScript and I'm learning ASP.net Ajax from the Sam's Teach Yourself. These are books that I highly recommend and they work great with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Most of the codes in it are cross browser compatible with Google Chrome also.