[pclark2]

I am working on a project that requires me to access course data from various university websites (just basic class schedule stuff). Most of these sites however have the data on a dynamically created page requiring post data from a form to show the desired information, and in some cases even require a login. I had been working in php to parse the course data from the websites where it is all on a nice static page, but do not know how to get it from these other sites.

My plan currently is to write a program to run on Ubuntu Linux to go out and fetch the data, but I am not sure which language would be best or even how I would do this. I have seen some programs control browsers before in Windows to get data, but I don't know if that is the best way or not or if that is even possible on Linux.

I don't know too much about software programming so I will need to learn a lot for this. So any ideas on what language to use or what functions to call or anything? Thanks for any help that can be given!