CGI Programming with Perl | 
| Authors: Gunther Birznieks, Scott Guelich, Shishir Gundavaram
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 200477
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 451
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 7 x 1.3
ISBN: 1565924193
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.2762
UPC: 636920924197
EAN: 9781565924192
Publication Date: January 15, 2000
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Amazon.com Review
The appearance of the second edition of CGI Programming with Perl heralds the beginning of the neoclassical era of Web service. CGI--or common gateway interface--is the original back end for client-driven, dynamic Web-page service and deserves consideration as the Romulus of the Internet Empire. But, where first-edition author Gundavaram described the lonely Romulus laying the brick foundation of dynamic Web-page service in 1996, second-edition collaborators Guelich and Birznieks have pitched in to resurrect Romulus amid the crowded streets of modern Rome. Why bother? Surely four years have brought technological revolutions (Java, PHP, ASP, ColdFusion) that render CGI's original brick-by-brick approach as obsolete as, say, Roman mythology--or bricks and mortar. And yet not. It is an ambiguous blessing that the original CGI persists, adhering to the underside of Web service by the duct tape that is Perl. This point is not missed by Guelich, Gundavaram, and Birznieks, whose advocacy of CGI is both bolstered by the growing applications module base of Perl and tempered by their awareness of CGI's structural limitations. Both new and returning readers of CGI Programming with Perl should browse the last chapter first in order to appreciate the proposed solutions to CGI's greatest sin: its impractical slowness in a world of a million-hits-per-day Web service. The chapter describes CGI-compatible FastCGI and mod_perl technologies that circumvent the process-spawning slowness of the simple CGI. Advanced users might want to skip directly to O'Reilly's fine mod_perl tome, Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C, by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern. The authors' second pass at CGI pedagogy is a lucid, honest, and expanded account that develops functionality of dynamic Web pages in a rational progression--from HTML client-server and CGI syntax basics to general input/output, forms, e-mail, graphics, and simple database applications, including maintaining client state and data persistence under the otherwise stateless HTTP protocol. The authors offer synopses of cookies, JavaScripting, server security, and XML, all of which are described in detail in other books. Whether or not neoclassical CGI is fast enough for your purposes--perhaps for guarded intranets--bear in mind that CGI is the standard to which every other Web server has had to respond. The second edition of CGI Programming with Perl is still the best introduction to the classics. --Peter Leopold
Product Description
Programming on the Web today can involve any of several technologies, but the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) has held its ground as the most mature method--and one of the most powerful ones--of providing dynamic web content. CGI is a generic interface for calling external programs to crunch numbers, query databases, generate customized graphics, or perform any other server-side task. There was a time when CGI was the only game in town for server-side programming; today, although we have ASP, PHP, Java servlets, and ColdFusion (among others), CGI continues to be the most ubiquitous server-side technology on the Web. CGI programs can be written in any programming language, but Perl is by far the most popular language for CGI. Initially developed over a decade ago for text processing, Perl has evolved into a powerful object-oriented language, while retaining its simplicity of use. CGI programmers appreciate Perl's text manipulation features and its CGI.pm module, which gives a well-integrated object-oriented interface to practically all CGI-related tasks. While other languages might be more elegant or more efficient, Perl is still considered the primary language for CGI. "CGI Programming with Perl," Second Edition, offers a comprehensive explanation of using CGI to serve dynamic web content. Based on the best-selling "CGI Programming on the World Wide Web," this edition has been completely rewritten to demonstrate current techniques available with the CGI.pm module and the latest versions of Perl. The book starts at the beginning, by explaining how CGI works, and then moves swiftly into the subtle details of developing CGI programs. Topics include: IncorporatingJavaScript for form validation Controlling browser caching Making CGI scripts secure in Perl Working with databases Creating simple search engines Maintaining state between multiple sessions Generating graphics dynamically Improving performance of your CGI scripts
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| Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...
 Write an outline before you start writing a book October 22, 2006
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Fairly good content, but hideously organized. The book jumps all over the place and really lacks the coherence I've come to expect from O'Reilly books. I used "Learning Perl" to get pretty good with Perl in two weeks. The book on HTML is terrific as well. A good "Learning CGI" book to lead into this one would be nice I think.
 Great in it's day August 27, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
When the first edition came out, it was an atypical O'Reilly book; they were known for publishing guides for working programmers, but this was more of an introduction to a topic instead of a reference.
The problem is that it's not 1998 anymore. The technology this book explains (quite clearly!) really isn't used that much anymore, save by people who already know Perl quite well and want to leverage that skill to simple web scripts.
PHP, Python, Java, and Ruby all come to mind as a few of the modern approaches to the same topic.
 Strike one for O'Reilly April 14, 2005
2 out of 12 found this review helpful
I was sorely disappointed that I purchased this book. I own just about every O'Reilly book on Perl there is and I grabbed this one off the shelf based on my past experience with the quality that I had come to expect from them. What a fool I was!
It has nothing new to add and isn't even that well written.
So how bad was it? I'm considering taking it with me the next time I visit my girlfriend (she lives within walking distance from their offices) so I can walk in and hand it back to them in person, hopefully that'll make the point stick!
After the errata, then what . . . September 27, 2003
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I've got the July 2000 printing and was amazed at the errata and the errata items yet to be "confirmed"! As an example of the latter, just beyond half-way through the book there's an address book cgi script some 10 pages in length of which only the first page or so is explained. The script is an attempt to use the Perl DBI along with the DBD::CSV modules (utilizing SQL statements) to explain the database role in "Data Persistance"! The problem is that the "getQueryResults" subroutine in the script doesn't return any records when searching for particular field values (and returns every record in the database if no values are entered in the "search" form). In addition the "doUpdate" module reports that an update has been completed when in reality there has been no change to the database! If you're planning on using the book to learn some CGI with Perl, then you're going to be set back by this and other code malfunctions scattered throughout the book!Even though it's a step up from the CGI Primer Plus for Windows book (and gets a 4 star rating), it still leaves much to be desired for the person who learns by coding!
A good place to start July 23, 2003
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
I purchased "CGI Programming with Perl" thinking it was, like many O'Reilly books, a bible of programming how-to for the working programmer. It's not. What it is, in fact, is a pretty good introduction to writing CGIs with Perl for someone who has some basic knowledge of Perl and HTTP, but who has never done any CGI programming. And that's just the position I was in when I bought it.The first third of the book is introductory in nature, with an introduction to how forms and CGI scripts work, some discussion of parsing forms in other languages, and some simple examples. The bulk of the book contains more complex examples of tasks like writing questionaires, interfacing with relational databases, maintaining state, graphics and so forth. I did glean a lot of useful information there. The biggest problem with this book is a problem that's really common to all book on Internet programming: Standards are changing so fast that a year old book is likely to contain chapter upon chapter illustrating obsolete techniques and libraries. In "CGI Programming" there are a lot of examples using Perl modules that haven't really caught on, while some of the newer modules (obviously) aren't meantioned. Another problem is that the book is kind of scattershot in the attention it gives different topics. Still, I think this is one of the better books for someone with basic Perl skills looking to get started with CGIs. There's enough detail here to start writing CGIs, and enough information out there on the web to go on learning.
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