Cgi How-To: The Definitive Cgi Scripting Problem-Solver
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 3.67Customer Rating: 2
Summary: Too simplistic approach
Comment: I found the book not very rewarding to read, and I feel the writers try to explain too much. So I found a lot of material I could have come up with myself, and just a few new things. By explaining everything rightaway, they take away all the challenge and excitement from the programming and reading.
The books q/a approach doesn't really appeal to me either and the fact that not all examples are available in C as they are in perl, is (to me as a C programmer) simply unforgivable.
A good reference manual for only C would have been more usefull to me.
I stopped reading the book after the first two chapters and have used the questions with the first few lines of explanation as programming exercises. So it wasn't totally useless afterall ;)
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: VERY dated but still of considerable value
Comment: This is a 1996 book still being sold in year 2000 and that says something about it. It is a very useful book in many respects. A whole lot of the stuff in it is as useful today as it was in 1996. However, just for perspective, Win 3.1 was still the dominant Windows platform back then, and there was no Microsoft browser (or server, for that matter) in general use -- Netscape was it. In fact, the index shows Win 3.1 and NT 4.0 (no Win 95) and there's not even an index entry for Microsoft! (There are for Netscape, Mac, etc.) The short list of potential programming errors is still useful, and the security risks listed are things you always have to have in the back of your mind. I think the book would be most useful if you were going use it in a site where not a whole lot had changed recently or where there was not much money for newer technology. They do provide scripts for such things as a shopping cart and it makes you wonder how many e-commerce sites on the web right now basically just loaded up the scripts from the CD-ROM as a starting point. I found the book useful, but as a consultant my needs are not those of someone who writes Perl for a living.
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: No online help
Comment: There is a good deal of valuable information here for the intermediate perl programmer, but no online errata sheet is provided, and the book is not flawless. Plan on spending a fair amount of time debugging on your own.