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Wednesday, 17 August 2005

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Books : CGI Programming with Perl

Rating:

- Good Grounding But Out Of Date
The 2nd, and current, edition was published in 2000 which is a lifetime ago in web development. It would have been nice to see mention of CSS and AJAX and less table designed web pages. I have dropped on star from my rating as I think O'Reilly should have updated it by now.

However the book does provide an excellent overview of cgi and the examples appear to cover all aspects of using Perl/cgi for web design. Although there is no mention of AJAX, javascript is discussed with examples given.

Rating:

- Confusingly structured and written
I'm new to perl and cgi. I found this book poorly structured and written compared to say 'Learning Perl' by Randal Schwartz. It does give you an overview of what can be done with cgi but how to specifically implement programming tasks is often vaguely or confusingly described. I found the out of print first edition by Gundavarum more help. It is available free on the O'Reilly web site.

Rating:

- An excellent in depth introduction to CGI using Perl
I have been programming for years but only recently got big time into CGI. I think this is an excellent book from which to gain your first in depth understanding of CGI and of how to approach the many different aspects of CGI programming using Perl. (Take a look at the index to see). I bought the book, read it cover to cover and use it. It does not set out to teach Perl and assumes that you know the language but you don't need to be a guru to understand the examples. If you want to build reliable Perl programs that automate page generation, handle form data, implement shopping carts, manipulate databases and automatically send e-mails then this book will get you off to a good start.

P.S. I have seen some complaints about the number of errata. These have not bothered me in the slightest. Just get the errata pages from O'Reilly and print them out.

Rating:

- A good intro to the theory of CGI with Perl
I found this book very useful in getting me up to speed writing simple scripts, and in adapting the scripts of others. The theory is very well explained, and the section on security a must. Since I have not copied the examples verbatim, the errors which others reported in the code had escaped me. Note, this book will not teach you Perl.

Rating:

- The list of errata is 12 pages long! Way too many mistakes.
I bought this book hoping that I could learn CGI programming from it. I have already worked through learning Perl which was good & I have Programming Perl as a reference. I am now about half way through this book & there are so many errors in it that I have ended up wasting a lot of valuable time. The list of errata on O'Reilly's site for this book is 12 pages long & I have found several that aren't listed there yet.

This book is not up to the usual O'Reilly standards. Save your money.