Tcl Tk

Cgi Developer's Resource: Web Programming in Tcl and Perl (Resource Series)

Format: Paperback
Author: J. M. Ivler
ReleaseDate: March, 1997
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Rating:

High level introduction followed by scripts and info.
It is a great idea for a book; unfortunately, this is a poor implementation of that idea. This is an introductory book on CGI, with examples written in both TCL and Perl.

Source code listings, tips, and notes are presented in way to make them almost unreadable (black text on a dark gray background). Notes and tips are written in a font designed to mimic handwriting, but makes it even more unreadable. I'm not talking distracting or unique, but unreadable. On page 73, the gray background gets darker the further the text progresses down the page, until you have black on black. A portion of that page is totally unreadable. This continues throughout the book. I am stunned that Prentice Hall didn't catch this. The design of this book is horrible.

Mr. Ivler aims the book for people comfortable with TCL or Perl (and UNIX), yet spends three chapters introducing the HTML protocol, firewalls, and other topics. The author's focus seems confused throughout the book and the author(s) loose sight of who the audience is frequently.

More or less, the second half of the book ends up documenting their scripts.

I also found the copyright notice offensive (page 575). . . that informs the readers that Ivler and Husain owned the code (fair enough), but also owned any modifications you make to the code (yeah, right).

On the plus side, it does have code you can cut and paste into your own projects and demonstrates what you can do with CGI on a limited scale, albeit without a lot of depth.

Not useful
I also noticed the bad production techniques on the graphics and found some sections to be very thin on the info. I too am sorry I spent the money on this one. I was looking for (the guts of doing cgi-sendmail, not just the use of a cookbook module . . . ) I guess I'll just wait for the Black Book version coming out -- I've found these to be real good.

don't buy

The information is poorly organized, incomplete and often incorrect. As others pointed out, the sidebars are unreadable because the background is a graduated greyscale that turns as black as midnight toward the bottom.

They borrow buggy code from other sources then admonish the readers on page 575 not to copy the code for their own use.