CGI Programming with Perl: Creating Dynamic Web Pages

I ordered a used book, and it was just as described in the listing. No problems whatsoever.

While the book description says "...starting point...to program in CGI and already knows some Perl" the book requires more than "some" Perl knowledge. I've worked mostly in C and C++ over the years with a little Perl recently - but not to the level this book assumes. That's not really a "bad" thing - it created a great learning situation and helped stretch my knowledge.The book is closer to a classroom textbook than an at home/work guide. The programming examples moved from trivial to complex and I could have used a little classroom help with some of the advanced practices. I'm very sure this will be a long-time reference text and referred to over & over again.Like just about every available text on Perl and/or CGI today the references are a bit dated. Discussions about Windows NT and HTML 3 are a little bit out of date, although the concepts discussed are still valid. Perl is referenced at the "soon to be released" 5.05 version - and that too is a bit old. I have not seen anything on the market as of early 2014 that is more up to date.I'd call this a very useful text, written at the intermediate to advanced level. It covers a lot of ground, going into discussions of JavaScript, graphic formats, database structures, and other important side-issues. Even for those experienced in working with other languages the section on "Guidelines for Better CGI applications" is a must-read. One of the better reviews of good programming practices I've seen.

a good book

I grabbed this book after reading a review on slashdot.org that rated it a 9 out of 10.When I saw some of the reviews here I had second thoughts, but fortunately I trusted slashdot. Someone here complained that the book talks about using modules, like CGI.pm. It does - there's a whole chapter devoted to CGI.pm, but the following chapter talks about another way to write CGIs: HTML templates (like Embperl, Mason, HTML::Template, etc.).This is an example of how balanced the book is. In both chapters the authors explain that different programmers have different preferences. Instead of only presenting one way of creating HTML output (or ignoring CPAN entirely like other CGI books), they present all the popular options. That lets you choose what works best for you (hey, Perl's slogan is TIMTOWTDI... there is more than one way to do it). Also, now I thorougly know how CGI.pm and Embperl work, and even though I might not use them for the scripts I write from scratch, it helps if I find myself working on a project that does use them (and lots do).This book doesn't just teach you CGI one way, like most other CGI books, and it doesn't promote certain technologies. Instead, it's very complete and the authors clearly show they have lots of experience with CGI.

While there're a few boooks available on CGI/Perl, what's different in this book you'd ask. If we compare it with "CGI Programming 101" by Jaqueline, it's more advanced and excersices better programming style. Uses 'strict' pragma and -wT switches ALL THE TIME, which I liked a lot. The programs are also compatible in mod_perl enviroment, which prove the fluency of the authors in Perl and Web Programming. Unfortunately their those capabilities don't make them good writers. They don't spend enough time on some of the concepts they introduce. They sepend more time and space then requried on JavaScript(chapter 7), which is about 23 pages, and spend only 16 pages on Data Persistence (chapter 10). But in Data Persistence chapter they tried to cover Text files, all kinds of file lockings, temporary files, DB_File, MLDBM, SQL, DBI. Now you have a rough picture of how dEtAiLeD their topisc are. Here I'll try go over chapters with comments and will be suggesting alternatives for the topic wherever it's applicableChapter 1, 2 and 3 give some history of the WWW and CGI. Also provide a smaple CGI application for getting started. I think chapter 2, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol" was pretty informative, and I ejoyed it a lot.Chapter 4, "Forms and CGI" go over some form anatomy and elementary ways of encoding and decoding form input, which you might find usefull.Chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to CGI.pm and it's application. I still think CGI.pm's documentation available online (or with your Perl distribution) does way better job than this one chapter.Chapter 6, "HTML Templates" gives some nice examples of HTML::Template and Embperl usage. They spend good space on these, but only about 3 pages to cover Mason. Of course, the chapter can't take you too far without the original documentations of those mentioned libraries which are available online.Chapter 7, as I mentioned was dedicated to JavaScript and JS validation. I think they were not supposed to spend so much time on JavaScript. For this one, go get JavaScript Bible, 4th edition by Danny Goodman.Chapter 8, Security covers the security guidelines already available online as W3C's security FAQ by L. Stein and John Stewart.Chapter 9, "Sending Email" was probably my favorite. It covers 'sendmai', mailx and mail and procmail. Spends good 18 pages on the topic and shows an examile that uses Mail::MailerChapter 11, Maintaining State, was really poor. There's nothing much to learn in that chapter. For more profesional session management examples, I suggest you "MySQL and Perl for the Web" by Paul DeBois and Apache::Session manual available online.Chapter 12, "Searching the web" give some advanced examples of web searching. The example of Inverted Index Search using DB_File was my favorite.Chapter 13, "Creating Graphics on the fly" give some examples of dynamic graphic generation using GD, Image::Magick and GD::Graph. I could give this chapter hmmm... 3 stars :)Chapter 14, "Middleware and XML" was the one I just skipped over.The last 3 chapters of the book are dedicated to debugging, coding with style and eficiency with mod_perl and FastCGI.For debugging and style, I recommend "Programming perl 3rd edition".Overall, i benefitted from the book a lot as it implies from my review. But still wanna save my 5 stars for the 3rd edition :)

This book is great for people who are starting out programming in CGI. A beginner's knowledge of Perl is required to get the full benefits of the book. I found the authors to be very objective and they touch upon every aspect of CGI. Unfortunately, due to space limitations I suppose, they cannot get too deep into any one topic. That is why this book is good for new comers to CGI. It will show you everything you need to know to get started with writing CGI scripts. They make reference to other books that go deeper into a particular topic (albeit from O'Reilly) throughout the book. I found this book to be an excellent learning tool for someone who is building his or hers first web site based on CGI/Perl. It reads well, explains topics well, and is good at getting right to the point.

Book is nice to read. However, example code some times will not run successfully and you may stuck for long time in some stupid error. I suggest a book with good examples.

I have been programming for years but only recently got big time into CGI. I think this is an excellent book from which to gain your first in depth understanding of CGI and of how to approach the many different aspects of CGI programming using Perl. (Take a look at the index to see). I bought the book, read it cover to cover and use it. It does not set out to teach Perl and assumes that you know the language but you don't need to be a guru to understand the examples. If you want to build reliable Perl programs that automate page generation, handle form data, implement shopping carts, manipulate databases and automatically send e-mails then this book will get you off to a good start.P.S. I have seen some complaints about the number of errata. These have not bothered me in the slightest. Just get the errata pages from O'Reilly and print them out.

The 2nd, and current, edition was published in 2000 which is a lifetime ago in web development. It would have been nice to see mention of CSS and AJAX and less table designed web pages. I have dropped on star from my rating as I think O'Reilly should have updated it by now.However the book does provide an excellent overview of cgi and the examples appear to cover all aspects of using Perl/cgi for web design. Although there is no mention of AJAX, javascript is discussed with examples given.