CGI Fast and Easy Web Development (Fast & Easy Web Development)
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 2.5Customer Rating: 2
Summary: Pretty disappointed
Comment: I have never seen in my life a programming book that chooses to use SCREEN shots for TEXT windows. If you can read the tiny code samples (the reason one would buy a book like this!) then maybe you'd find it of value. I never unwrapped the CD because I felt the book was tedious to read and gave weak examples. I give it two over one stars because if it were the only book on the subject it might be worth reading, but fortunately it is not. Conversely the PHP fast and easy book was excellent so that is why I bought this one. Shame on PrimaTech to not use the same standards.
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: Some parts good others frustrating
Comment: The book does explain the interaction of Forms, cookies etc through the CGI to manipulation in Perl. This is does well - where would you start to describe programming so you could describe the whole in a sequential manner without any hiccough?
Before reading I had some mixed ideas about CGI/Perl and the other languages. I have programmed for many years so learning Perl is not too up hill - regular expressions are the big learning for me.
I would rate the book higher if it only had the text. The big let down is the CD-ROM. There are the usual couple of time-limited demos plus the all important examples from the chapters. Here is the let down - you spend an age matching example in book to 'what they've called it' on the CD. Worse still you expect to have the Perl script available to pop up on your own server. Think again! So you are forced to run the HTML as is (pointing to Johnnie's web) only to find the web doesn't exist. Now that's bad! To be fair there are some Perl scripts on the CD, but nowhere near 100%. One of the best ways of learning is to examine other people's code.
Overall - gentle explanation of CGI and Perl, at reasonable cost, with some support from CD. 3/5. Improve the CD contents and that would be 4 or 5/5
Customer Rating: 4
Summary: Not -that- bad at all!
Comment: I felt the last review was a bit unfair. While I agree that the book could have benefitted from additional examples, I thought the level of explanation was adequate.
On the down side: As an intermediate tutorial, I thought that there ought to have been more depth as to what one can do with CGI. Cookies and Forms are interesting, but I'd like to know how to make some of the more complex applications. The book lacked these, and thus I would not recommend it for advanced programmers unless they want a handy reference manual for the quick stuff.
On the up side: I thought the writers did an excellent job explaining the 'why' and 'how' of CGI. With the knowledge of the internal workings they gave me, I feel confident that I can accomplish what I want to accomplish with CGI. That's something I found lacking in quite a few of the other manuals I flipped through.
Who I recommend it for: Anyone who'd like to understand -why- CGI works, and would like to get thier feet wet with some simple CGI scripting.