[ginahoy]

Hi, this is my first post. I'm not really up on current programming languages, but it occurred to me yesterday that a scripting language of some sort might be just the ticket for a project I'm working on. Since these forums are mostly language-specific, I thought I'd describe my project in the New Members forum. Hopefully someone can tell me which language might best fit my application...

I want to grab some climate data from a website so I can build my own database for analytical purposes. Among other things, the website has monthly averages for various weather data for thousands of US cities in tabular form. Here's an example:

http://www.city-data.com/city/Reserve-New-Mexico.html

The data of interest are in the two tables about 2/3 way down the page. Although I don't need the data from every city covered by this website, it would probably be easier to get it all, and then I can sort things out later.

So I'd like to write a script that would crawl the site, retrieving the zip codes and climate data from all the towns, and stuff it into a database. I own MS Access 2k, and that's about it. Once I have the data, I'm good to go.

I don't have resources to pay someone to do this for me, but I'm a fast learner -- I studied s/w systems engineering in graduate school and have (or should I say, DID have) competency in several (now antique) languages. So once I figure out which language to use, I'll find a good book and get busy...

TIA for your advice!
David