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Cgi

Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Second Edition

Format: Paperback
Author: Elizabeth Castro
ReleaseDate: 29 May, 2001
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Rating:

A must for learning Perl
Elizabeth Castro clearly puts great care into communicating. "Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web" is well organized, well written, and easy to understand. She succeeds.

This book worked well for me as an instructional text, and now I use it as a reference. It's a must for anyone who wants to learn Perl.

This book is my bible
When I finally broke down and realized I was going to have to learn ANOTHER language I went out and reluctantly bought this book because it was the only one on the shelf. I have been programming since 1977.

I came from a C background and was amazed how quickly the author was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together for me.

While she skipped over large areas and didn't cloud issues with obnoxious synonyms of the perl language I understood the basics enough that when I need that simple unanswered question I only need to look on the Net.

I will be eternally grateful for E Castro and her marvellous book! Thank you.

Doesn't really cover even the basics of CGI.pm


I really like the format of the Visual Quickstart books. This is a very basic CGI book-- perhaps a little too basic. The books are easy to follow, and it's simple to open to book to any section, read the page and close the book. Unlike other Perl books, there are no long, drawn out diatribes.

Here's the big problem with this book-- The author only covers a single part of Perl's CGI capabilities-- she covers the param() function, but little else.

It would be enormously helpful if the book covered other basic perl topics --- the header() function to create the HTML header, the print_head("This is the title") function to start the HTML page, the p("Hello World!") function to print a paragraph, etc.

It's fine that the book doesn't cover object-oriented programming, but it's silly that the book doesn't cover other basic HTML functions.

Some other minor downsides:

- The book uses many CGI examples which need a HTML form and a CGI script. The book doesn't contain the text for the HTML forms, and it's hard to follow the examples if you don't have the HTML in front of you.

- The book is dated, and discusses out-of-date HTML. Most sites have been running XHTML (or something close) for several years, but this book uses bad HTML4. 0 examples.

- If the examples would be much easier to read if the author used proper indenting for the Perl code. .