Customer Reviews

CGI Developer's Resource (Resource Series)

5 star:		(0)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This was required reading for a web applications class. I am sorry I wasted money on it. The writing alternated between tedious and redundant. The editing was so bad I found typos in every page. The graphics looked like something out of an elementary school art project. More important, they interfered with the text and made it difficult to read. Every page was an eyesore. What little valuable information I could glean from the text wasn't worth the wading. The publisher should be ashamed. Midway through the course, I threw the book in a corner in disgust. Save your money.

I too am sorry I spent the money on this one. I also noticed the bad production techniques on the graphics and found some sections to be very thin on the info. I was looking for (the guts of doing cgi-sendmail, not just the use of a cookbook module ...) I guess I'll just wait for the Black Book version coming out -- I've found these to be real good.

I found much useful information in this book though it wasn't easy, wading through all the typos and sidebars which blended the backgroud color to the text color. Nearly unreadable. Mr. Ivler's book was not done justice by this publisher.

As others pointed out, the sidebars are unreadable because the background is a graduated greyscale that turns as black as midnight toward the bottom.

The information is poorly organized, incomplete and often incorrect.

They borrow buggy code from other sources then admonish the readers on page 575 not to copy the code for their own use.

This is an introductory book on CGI, with examples written in both TCL and Perl. It is a great idea for a book; unfortunately, this is a poor implementation of that idea.

Source code listings, tips, and notes are presented in way to make them almost unreadable (black text on a dark gray background). Notes and tips are written in a font designed to mimic handwriting, but makes it even more unreadable. I'm not talking distracting or unique, but unreadable. On page 73, the gray background gets darker the further the text progresses down the page, until you have black on black. A portion of that page is totally unreadable. This continues throughout the book. I am stunned that Prentice Hall didn't catch this. The design of this book is horrible.

Mr. Ivler aims the book for people comfortable with TCL or Perl (and UNIX), yet spends three chapters introducing the HTML protocol, firewalls, and other topics. The author's focus seems confused throughout the book and the author(s) loose sight of who the audience is frequently.

More or less, the second half of the book ends up documenting their scripts.

I also found the copyright notice offensive (page 575)... that informs the readers that Ivler and Husain owned the code (fair enough), but also owned any modifications you make to the code (yeah, right).

On the plus side, it does have code you can cut and paste into your own projects and demonstrates what you can do with CGI on a limited scale, albeit without a lot of depth.