Customer Reviews

Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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!!!!!

Firstly you should have some programming background to get the most out of this book - Unix platform being the most helpful. This book leaves no guesswork for the reader and provides everything you need to know in using CGI today! The best part of Elizabeth's books is that she provides a website for Q&A, updates, and revisions as supplemental material. She is truely one of the few authors who takes care and effort in trying to maximize a reader's understanding of the material. Yes this is a newbie book, nothing is glossed over or left to the imagination. I'm actually a fan of the 1st edition of this book and would recommend it instead. However, the 2nd edition is the result of suggestions and input from readers of the 1st edition as well as providing information on how to set up a desktop web-server to test your scripts. If your test platform is Linux then everything you'll need comes standard. If it's Windows then you'll have some choices to make and install (don't worry it's all free). If using Mac OS10.x then your test platform is ready to go with little effort!

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.

Many educational books lead you along a plodding path, and if you skip ahead, you find yourself lost in the woods.

My motivation to learn anything is that I already have a practical application in mind and I want to gain enough knowledge to write it. If I don't have more applications on the back burner, I may well forget half of what I learned once the application is written, but I accept that about myself.

The organization of this book was such that it was easy to jump back and forth through the chapters, getting a handle on the bits I needed to write my script.

When I paused a few months, forgot a lot, then had another bright idea for a script, it was easy to dive right back in, using this book to refresh my knowledge and expand it a bit.

On the other hand, if you're coming in as a stark beginner, you can go through it chapter by chapter while you build up the confidence to start bouncing around.

It is mainly a survey of different concepts, without going too deeply into any. That's why it's called a "quickstart" guide. It's supposed to help you get out of the gate quickly and it does so excellently.

You may find that once you go beyond simple scripting, you'll need a more advanced book to help you dig down into the guts of Perl, but once you get to that point, you'll find that the [ahhhem] dollars you spent on this book were a heck of an investment, because you'll be able to plow into those more advanced tomes and not feel lost.

I found both the layout and the text of this book difficult to learn from. With its small visual chunks, my eyes had to jump around the page excessively in order to take in the information presented. The font size and colors didn't help readability.

Also, it seemed like important points were glossed over while trivial details were belabored. For example, I couldn't find explanations of some of the perl syntax used in examples, yet anchor tags were explained step by step, where the first step was to 'type an opening angle bracket <', then 'type a href= ' ...and so on. This just seemed absurd to me, but I guess some readers aren't bothered by the uneven levels of coverage.

I have since switched to "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz and "CGI 101" by Jacqueline Hamilton, and am much happier with these books.

I was on vaction and decided to learn cgi that is the only book i have ever read on the subject and i have now written a chat room severall useful scripts i have an everychat add-on for the eversoft everychat and i am in the process of writing a forum (i am almost done... pray for me)

This book completely set me in my ways as to what language to stick with and i love perl/cgi now anyone who wants to get started with cgi perl or just programmin in general should definately read this book

If your interested in Perl programming for your web site...THIS IS THE BOOK. I bought Perl for Dummies which was good but too broad-based. It covered topics from A-Z, but this book is excellent for web users of Perl. Also you should get the Javascript Quick Start Guide.

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! <gold star>.

This is a great book for the intermediate to well-seasoned HTML coder who is looking to explore server-side scripting. Experience with regular programming helps to pick up the language even more quickly, although it is certainly not necessary. Having been introduced to the many uses of Perl/CGI after installing and using several scripts like those on the CGI Resource Index (http://www.cgi-resources.com), I was well aware of the practicality of what I was learning (after reading to chapter 3, I began writing Perl with a purpose, using the book only as a reference). I'm now very comfortable with the language, and have moved on to more advanced projects (and, consequently, more advanced resources). I HIGHLY recommend this book, as well as others in the Visual Quickstart series (especially those written by Elizabeth Castro).

Although I am computer knowledgeable and have several certifications, I knew absolutely nothing about Perl and CGI before reading this text. I looked at several other texts that were larger but seemed to contain a lot more fluff instead of actually useful information. This book was excellent for learning Perl and CGI starting from complete ground zero.
Within hours I was creating and testing scripts and actually wrote one to do what I needed done. I also downloaded another script that would not work and was able to troubleshoot and fix it to do what I needed. An excellent book that walks you through the steps one item at a time it was easy to understand and work through.
One of the things that this book contained that I did not see in other books was instructions on how to download, install and setup a personal server so that you can test the scripts you write as you learn. This information alone makes this book superior to most others. There is no better learning environment than being able to actually write and test the scripts.
Some HTML knowledge is assumed, however it is very little. Picking up a basic HTML book allows you to quickly come up to speed with the knowledge assumed. On the other hand, the required HTML knowledge is easily obtained from various sites on the Internet.
I could not recommend this book highly enough for anyone who needs to learn Perl and CGI basics and needs to get up to speed as soon as possible.