Stein Official Guide to Programming CGI

The Offical Guide to Programming with CGI is an introductory level text covering Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module. CGI.pm is the standard perl module for working with CGI. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is the standard interface by which external programs can interace with web servers. The text assumes the reader has at least a beginner's knowledge of Perl and HTML. For instance, readers are assumed to know how to use modules, but no prior knowledge of object oriented perl is required. Likewise, the reader should have a passing familiarity with HTML tags, forms in particular. This book is particularly beginner friendly. The reader should be able to walk away from the book with the ability to create simple websites which take and respond to user input. The potential CGI.pm programmer will gain a fundamental knowledge of the module, its interface, and how it may be used to generate HTML. The text also includes a very detailed reference guide which may appeal to those people who prefer to hold what they're reading. While the book was published back in 1998, it hasn't become outdated. It is pleasantly surprising that CGI.pm's interface has changed so little. Support for new standards like XHTML have been added since the book was originally published, but have had little net effect on the use of CGI.pm itself. Why CGI? Isn't that the way people used to write dynamic web pages? Yes. And where portability concerns outweigh performance, it still is. Also, if you're a relative novice or don't have an endless supply of round tuits, CGI programming may present the lowest barrier of entry into dynamic web programming. Even if you later move on to one of the newer templating systems a fundamental knowledge of CGI.pm and how it works will still be useful. Not to mention that some of the templating systems for instance HTML::Mason will run on top of CGI, even though most are primarily designed to work with Apache and mod_perl. For those who would appreciate a short description of what mod_perl is, it basically puts a copy of Perl inside the Apache executable making powerful hooks available to perl scripts and avoiding the overhead of executing a separate process for each CGI script. The author of the book, Lincoln Stein, is also the author of the module itself. In the book, Stein takes the reader through a gradual progression of scenarios and solutions. The explanations are thorough and the pace gradually takes the reader into more advanced topics. In short, it is a concise introduction to CGI programming with Perl. Low level details, like how CGI works under the hood and more advanced topics like security, cascading style sheets, javascript, and persistence are touched upon but not covered in particular depth. The author does however provide many timely references to books and websites where the reader can find more information on those topics.

If you want to pick up and start using CGI.pm this book will certainly help you out. It does a decent job explaining what the module is and what it can do. The problem is, the CGI.pm module is not that hard to understand. The book is also kind of thin in that there are only really 2-3 architectural examples of using server side CGI for page state and transition management. So whats there in the book is ok, but hardly worth the full price. This should be a more budget priced book simply because it just covers the very basics of CGI coding. Any skilled programmer who understands the basics of CGI won't get that much out of this book. That being said, it beats reading through the CGI.pm online documentation. It just should not cost as much as it does. Another problem is that the perl and html in the examples is out of date and I was not a fan of the style of coding in general. A few too many times, convoluted (but efficient) coding was used. While this is fine for your own code, when you are writing code for training and demonstration the code should be a bit more clear. So, the book does work as a quick overview of the CGI.pm module and its written by the modules author so there is that :) It should have been a lot more detailed with better examples, to justify its price, or a but shorter at a bargain price. The bottom line is, there is not much you are going to get out of this book that you would not gleen from reading the online CGI.pl doc and a few decent examples.

Who better to write a book on the CGI.pm module than the author of the module himself. I must admit that I was afraid that the book wouldn't be intelligible given the fact that many brilliant programmers aren't necessarily gifted writers, but he pulled it off very well! A basic knowledge of Perl is helpful in getting the most out of this book. I would strongly recommend reading at least the first few chapters of "Learning Perl" for people without any other programming skills, or the first few chapters of "Programming Perl" for those coming to Perl from another language. I found that using this book in conjunction with "MySQL and Perl for the Web" gave me a great experience. Even though the latter book sounds like it is aimed more at the DB end, it has a couple good chapters on getting up and running with Perl/CGI and mod_perl. Was also quite thankful that Lincoln covered both the traditional and Object-Oriented interfaces to the module. Great Book!

I must confess that I could do virtually none of the programming that I do without Lincoln's fine work, but it's sometimes frustrating with so many broken examples. Once you figure out the syntax, you'll be OK. There's a lot of easy-to-find reference. Make sure you test very small sections of code on their own and insert it into your programs when you get it working. Then refer to your working programs (copy & paste) when you make others. Again, much credit needs to be given to Mr Stein, but Paul DuBois' Book MySql and Perl For The Web explains CGI.pm much better (you'll still need Stein's book if you're going to be serious about CGI) with examples that really,really, work, extreme attention to detail, and incredible organization.

I've bought this book basically not to burn my eyes reading man pages from the screen. The text itself is good and is exactly what the title tells you - a printed user's manual to (most) popular Perl module. Now I have to ask: how on earth can a book be designed as poorly as that? Whoever the designer is, I'd strongly recommed him(her?) to buy "The Form of the Book" by Jan Tchicold (hope I spelled it correctly).