Cgi
The Cgi/Perl Cookbook
Format: Paperback
Author: Craig Patchett
ReleaseDate: 14 October, 1997
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Rating:
The Cgi/Perl Cookbook
The contact email address in them bounces, perhaps the author's gone into hiding in shame. The scripts are buggy and don't even work out of the box and they certainly aren't well written enough for a production website.
On the plus point they do give some ideas on what could be done to improve a site, as long as you write your own Perl.
Be prepared for a Do It Yourself Experience...
The book does provide 20 usefull CGI scripts that one can fool around with, since there is a line by line explanation of all the scripts, I could figure out what makes it tick without having to actually learn perl. I purchased this book in 1999 with the intention of developing my CGI skills and implement CGI programs in my website projects. On the Good Side: 1. Explanation of the scripts, line by line. 2. 20 Ready to use sripts and a few subroutines. 3. HTML Templates for using the scripts. 4. A website with updates and a forum. On the Not so Good Side: 1. All the scripts are quite rudimentary, very basic operations. 2. You need to know how to configure the script to work in the server. This is where you will spend most of your time, yet little documentation on this subject is provided. 3. The website referred by the book is never updated. Overall, I think it is a good book for someone who wants to jump into CGI for the first time, is tenacious, and is ready to invest a good amount of hours figuring things out on his own.
There are errors and other complexities involved.
" They are not "Ready-to-use. The programs are not really "ready-to-run." Programming is required, because there are bugs in html documents and scripts that must be corrected. The book is a good resource of information for people who want to study and learn and troubleshoot and learn Perl, because it is possible to get the scripts to work if the troubleshooter does not give up until they get things to work satisfactorily. I believe that it is practically impossible for a person to use these scripts without having some experience with Perl and CGI and HTML. The book has a lot of good explanations of code, which I find helpful and useful. I can't blame anyone for selling the book in the way it is sold. Salesmen sell the book. Programmers who successfully learn, don't give up when things don't work easily. This is book for beginning programmers.
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