Official Guide to Programming with CGI.PM

by Lincoln Stein

A complete guide to creating interactive Web pages using the Perl CGI.pm library from its creator. Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm contains all the information about CGI.pm found in Perl's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471247448
• ISBN13: 9780471247449
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Wow, incredible high-level power in this module.

The author has done a wonderful job of explaining how to use the CGIpm module. If you understand the basics of perl, you should be able to go through the bulk of this book. And with just a slight acquaintance with Perl references and anonmous list, you'll be surprised how quick and easy this is to master. This book puts other CGI books to shame because other books shy away from discussing all the cool functions in CGI.pm.

Still worth reading today

The Offical Guide to Programming with CGI is an introductory level text covering Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module. CGI.pm is the standard perl module for working with CGI. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is the standard interface by which external programs can interace with web servers. The text assumes the reader has at least a beginner's knowledge of Perl and HTML. For instance, readers are assumed to know how to use modules, but no prior knowledge of object oriented perl is required. Likewise, the reader should have a passing familiarity with HTML tags, forms in particular. This book is particularly beginner friendly.The reader should be able to walk away from the book with the ability to create simple websites which take and respond to user input. The potential CGI.pm programmer will gain a fundamental knowledge of the module, its interface, and how it may be used to generate HTML. The text also includes a very detailed reference guide which may appeal to those people who prefer to hold what they're reading.While the book was published back in 1998, it hasn't become outdated. It is pleasantly surprising that CGI.pm's interface has changed so little. Support for new standards like XHTML have been added since the book was originally published, but have had little net effect on the use of CGI.pm itself.Why CGI? Isn't that the way people used to write dynamic web pages? Yes. And where portability concerns outweigh performance, it still is. Also, if you're a relative novice or don't have an endless supply of round tuits, CGI programming may present the lowest barrier of entry into dynamic web programming.Even if you later move on to one of the newer templating systems a fundamental knowledge of CGI.pm and how it works will still be useful. Not to mention that some of the templating systems for instance HTML::Mason will run on top of CGI, even though most are primarily designed to work with Apache and mod_perl. For those who would appreciate a short description of what mod_perl is, it basically puts a copy of Perl inside the Apache executable making powerful hooks available to perl scripts and avoiding the overhead of executing a separate process for each CGI script.The author of the book, Lincoln Stein, is also the author of the module itself. In the book, Stein takes the reader through a gradual progression of scenarios and solutions. The explanations are thorough and the pace gradually takes the reader into more advanced topics. In short, it is a concise introduction to CGI programming with Perl.Low level details, like how CGI works under the hood and more advanced topics like security, cascading style sheets, javascript, and persistence are touched upon but not covered in particular depth. The author does however provide many timely references to books and websites where the reader can find more information on those topics.

Excellent choice for anyone who wants to write Perl/CGI

Who better to write a book on the CGI.pm module than the author of the module himself. I must admit that I was afraid that the book wouldn't be intelligible given the fact that many brilliant programmers aren't necessarily gifted writers, but he pulled it off very well!A basic knowledge of Perl is helpful in getting the most out of this book. I would strongly recommend reading at least the first few chapters of "Learning Perl" for people without any other programming skills, or the first few chapters of "Programming Perl" for those coming to Perl from another language.I found that using this book in conjunction with "MySQL and Perl for the Web" gave me a great experience. Even though the latter book sounds like it is aimed more at the DB end, it has a couple good chapters on getting up and running with Perl/CGI and mod_perl. Was also quite thankful that Lincoln covered both the traditional and Object-Oriented interfaces to the module. Great Book!

Easy Web Magic

This book is so easy to read and understand.In about two days I was using cookies to maintain state, I have since writen a form mailer that puts data into csv, and a bunch of other cool stuff. EASY, a fast read, and you'll be able to jump right in and do a lot of cool stuff immediately.

Necessary documentation for an excellent (FREE) product.

I rated this book as 5 stars, not because I can't see how it could be improved, but because the product it documents is so valuable, and the book is necessary to get full value from CGI.pm.While the book's content mostly duplicates information which can be found at the CGI.pm web site, and/or in the CGI.pm source code, it does present it in a much more convenient manner, and seems to contain additional, valuable information.I've used this book for a couple of months now, and wish to refute some of the criticism by other reviewers.The example font is much less bold than the text, but I use reading glasses, and wouldn't even have noticed the lighter font, if it hadn't been pointed out to me in other reviews. Perhaps it doesn't photocopy well?The reference section is a little confusing since it contains some subsections which, in turn, contain alphabetic organization, rather than being strictly alphabetic throughout. The book has a decent index, however, so this isn't a real problem. Besides the organization is beginning to make sense.The book is not quite up-to-date with the product it documents, but publishing a book does have some turn around time after all. My boss and I could use another copy, we'll probably get one as soon as the next edition is available.