Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, Second Edition
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 4.41Customer Rating: 4
Summary: Great place to start and a decent reference besides
Comment: Castro has written several books in the Visual Quick Start series including her best-selling HTML book and more recently her book on XML. I've been using the HTML and Perl/CGI books since 2001 on various projects and have found them extremely useful. I have a few other books in the VQS series and I can tell you that they are not all created equal. Castro, however, is pretty thorough which is why this book is not only a good starting place, but a usable reference as well.
Some topics covered include getting familiar with Perl syntax and functions, installing Perl, communicating with Web servers, creating HTML pages and forms, serving up data, and dealing with security. If you know any programming language, you can begin to pick up Perl very quickly from her examples. In fact I used this book to tackle my first Perl script and had it working fairly quickly. She assumes some knowledge of HTML and the basics of Web servers and browsers.
Advanced topics such as using databases to store or retrieve data on Web pages is not covered in this fairly small book, but that is a topic worthy of a separate book anyway. Other issues such as dealing with specific Web servers are also best left to other books. For the price and ease of use, I highly recommend Castro's book. You'll be seeing the results of your first CGI script in no time at all.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: An eagle among the turkeys
Comment: Last week I knew nothing about CGI or how to go about learning it. I've been in the computer industry for decades & am well aware how difficult it is to find a good book on anything to do with computer technology. As I browsed the shelves of internet books at my local bookstore, looking for something that would help, I have to admit I felt somewhat disheartened by the hopelessness of the task. You see, there were so many books on the internet and it seemed, each were 700 pages or more in length. (I looked at a few of them. Hopelessly complex.)
There wedged between two 100 pounders were two copies of Perl and CGI for the world wide web. By pure chance, I reached over and picked one of them, took a seat and began to browse through it. In no time, I found my self scribbling down web addresses mentioned in P&CGI until I came across the section on getting and installing a personal web server. How to set up your own little test environment. It was written in plain English ... and small capsules of information that could easily be understood. I was sold! I paid for it and hurried home. Within a few hours I was deep into the book, having downloaded the requisite PWS and set up my development environment. Everything worked exactly as your book says. When I uploaded my simple CGI script to my basic webpage voila! it worked there too! Now I know how marconi felt when first he heard the crackling of the radio signal coming across the Atlantic!
This is why I writing to you. I feel compelled to congratulate you on the marvelous job you've done in presenting this material. There are only two other books I can remember in my 30-year love affair with computers that come close to your book ... both were on PC-Forth. Yours is an amazing feat. A fantastic introduction that demystifies CGI, Perl and web programming. You deserve a gold star!
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: A good beginner book but you will need to know HTML
Comment: I bought this book to put CGI on my own website. When you send your data on the examples in this book they go to the authors CGI pages at a web site (www.cookbook.com)But you can use these examples on your own server and I have IIS version 5.1.
The purpose of me trying to learn CGI was to make CGI scripts to have my own web page have my own Guestbook,ect,ect..
This book really does help in learning perl. If you have IIS server on your computer there is a web site you can go to just type in "IIS Server .pl and .cgi on IIS Server" in Google search engine and you should find a web page to help you; and you should be able to get your IIS server running .cgi scripts from out of this book. A great book for beginners!!!!!