Cgi
Writing CGI Applications with Perl
Format: Paperback
Author: Kevin Meltzer
ReleaseDate: 15 February, 2001
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:
A rare gem 
The attraction of this book is simple: there are countless sources that teach you how to write a CGI "page" -- a single script that has a couple states. This is a fantastic book! It is best for people who already know Perl and have written basic CGI scripts and now wish to write full-blown applications. But it turns out that writing CGI-based "applications" are much harder.
This is one of the rare books that discusses the architecting of CGI-based *applications* including the full source of a very interesting content management application. As such, this book is virtually unique among the dozens of others books. It is not perfect and I keep hoping that the authors will come out with an updated edition. But for all that, it remains unparalleled.
Not a good introduction to CGI 
I got about 150 pages into it and now I need to buy a different book. I bought this book because the Amazon reviewers loved it so much. This book is good for people who really really like to learn by rote. The authors cover interesting and important topics, but they don't explain them well. They don't even try to outline the purpose of a script before coding it. They also introduce functions that are new to the reader somewhere in the middle of a script. They never write, "This is function x. It can be used like this. . . Here is an example. . . . " They just start coding without any introduction except for some stupid jokes. That said, if you already know a buttload of Perl and DBI and CGI programming, you might like this book for the examples. Also, there were way too many errors in the text and the code, and that makes it even harder to learn.
Not all I expected
It wasn't. I read the raving previous reviews and thought this would be the CGI book for me. I know a bit of perl, but relatively little about cgi (I know a bit, but not much). Here are my comments:
Good things:
- I thought most of the example programs in the text were good and illustrated the points being made.
- I liked the discussion on taint Bad points:
- I thought the examples were somewhat random and did not give me tools to attack general problems.
- I would have liked a better description of cgi. pm (perhaps I should get Lincoln Stein's book)
- I did not like the line by line format of the code. I found this very distracting and redundant. I would have preferred seeing the code and then having the authors describe the main points of the code (instead of all the trivial comments inbetween all the lines).
- I did not like the dependence on databases. Perhaps this is something most serious cgi programmers use, but storing my data in text files is sufficient for most of the applications I might use. I would have preferred a separate chapter on database and cgi (or I could just buy a separate book on this). I'm not sure why everyone else raved about the book so much, but I didn't find it so wonderful.
|
