CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

by Shishir Gundavaram

The World Wide Web is more than a place to put up clever documents and pretty pictures. With a little study and practice, you can offer interactive queries and serve instant information from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565921682
• ISBN13: 9781565921689
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 450 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book! I'd recommend it to anyone!

This is an excellent book. I'd recommend it to anyone who is getting started in CGI programming. It will not teach you Perl; for that I used O'Reilly's "Programming perl" while I read through this book's examples. For CGI programming, however, this book does its job very well.I noticed another review that said that code in this book didn't work. I've actually used code from this book in a half-dozen sites now, and it worked fine. More importantly, the code was well-enough explained that I've modified it over and over again to do what I needed.I still pull this book out every so often, and a few of my friends come by my house and read it. It's a very useful tool for anyone who wants to get started with CGI programming.

Good introduction to CGI Programming

CGI Programming can be a tricky skill to master. The author has done a good job of introducing the reader to CGI programming, describing how to write forms in HTML and how to make them interactive with CGI perl scripts. Having done CGI programming for some time now, I realise how much this book (and its source code examples) has helped. However, more advanced programmers would spend their money better by purchasing a more advanced book.

O'Reilly and Associates have done it again!

O'Reilly and Associates has yet another feather in their cap with this outstanding book. The text is clear and consise. Everything you need to know about CGI is explained in this book. I read this book from cover to cover in 2 days. CGI was a complete mystery to me. I thought it was going to be something complex based on all of the hype. It turns out that CGI is very simple if explained properly, which this book most definitely does. Now that I am programming CGI on a routine basis, I find myself referencing this book often. The only negative for this book (this is REALLY being picky) is that the examples are written exclusively in Perl. In fact, if you don't know the basics of Perl, I recommend you consult one of the two outstanding O'Reilly and Associates books on Perl first. While I acknowledge that Perl is the easiest and most popular language to use for CGI development, I would have preferred a stronger discussion using C/C++ for those of us looking for extra efficiency in our developed programs. With a little extra time and energy, all of the examples in the book could be written in each of the popular CGI languages: Perl, C, C++, TCL, and VB. If a second edition were to be published with the examples in multiple languages and a companion CD containing these examples, my rating for this book would be an 11 for sure!

Definitive, practical, accurate: great stuff.

Cover factor: ok, so O'Reilly titles aren't high on the list of dressing up their content. But in a few words, CGI Programming on the WWW is the most useful, complete, comprehensive, practical and definitive work I've found from among 5 or 6 related titles. It's worth reading cover to cover, and is the perfect step up to advanced CGI when you've got a basic understanding of PERL in particular. Well written, well organized, and for me, indispensible

An excellent introduction to the backdoor of Web publishing

Shishir Gundavaram shines as O'Reilly's latest author in the best introduction available on CGI programming, the "back-end" of Web site creation for the internet. Gundavaram begins his work with a detailed description of the CGI protocols and how they interrelate to web programming. Using Perl 5.0, one of many languages available for CGI programming, Gundavaram quickly moves on to discuss the creation of interactive forms on the Web, linking these forms to available databases of information, and making the client's browser remember information about a user from session to session using Netscape's "cookie" technology. Finally, Gundavaran includes information about testing CGI scripts and on increasing their security, certainly two important aspects when using potentially dangerous programs on internet-accessable web machines. Perhaps the best aspect of Gundavaran's work is its emphasis on examples. From guestbooks to games, Gundavaran shows how easy it is to increase interactivity on a web site using CGI and forms. Overall, Gundavaran's creation is a information-packed, no- nonsense reference and tutorial guide to CGI programming.