Customer Reviews

The CGI/PERL Cookbook (Cookbooks)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I almost didn't buy this book after reading some of the negative reviews, but decided to take a look at it after noticing that none of the negative reviews went into much detail...making me wonder if the reviews were accurate or just the result of some kind of grudge against Mr. Patchett or Mr. Wright. I'm glad I took the time to look at, and subsequently buy, the book.

With a few exceptions, I think most of the other reviews for this book do a good job of pointing out its imperfections. There are some inevitable bugs (corrected at the book's Web site), I wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't have any interest in learning at least a little bit about Perl, and it could use some additional detail on the installation process for the scripts in some places.

That's the bad news. The good news, on the other hand, is that it is an invaluable resource for learning CGI scripting with Perl, especially for anyone who, like me, likes to learn by looking at actual code and having someone explain it. I've already used several of the scripts as is, modified one other, and borrowed code from several places to start building a custom script of my own. I think I got my $40 worth the first day I had it!

Having spent some time with the book, I feel that somebody should address some of the issues brought up in some of the other "hit and run" reviews posted here. While it's true that the scripts are written in Perl 4 (which is backwards compatible with Perl 4), the authors have pointed out that this was a conscious choice on their part because Perl 4 is easier for the beginner to learn. I agree. As for the comments about security issues, I am familiar with the problems that were inherent with Mr. Wright's older scripts and these problems, as far as I can see, do not exist in the scripts presented in the book. Either Mr. Wright has learned from his previous mistakes or Mr. Patchett had a hand in removing security holes. Searching through the archives for the book's mailing list, I only came across one reported security problem in the last two years of posts to the list and a solution to that problem was promptly posted by the authors.

One last thing that I really like about this book is the support for it that the authors provided by setting up a private mailing list for book owners. Not only do members of the list help each other out with any questions about the book's scripts (whether simple or complex), but there are also some great discussions on enhancing the scripts and adding additional features to them. How often have you bought a book and been stranded without any support? That the book's mailing list is going strong two years after the book's release is a testimony to its value.

In short, I feel that this book makes a great addition to any Web developer's library, and is particularly useful to anyone developing CGI scripts of their own.

This book is just what I was looking for...the printed equivalent of someone sitting down with me and explaining how their CGI scripts work and going over each one line by line. I've used some of the scripts as is, modified others, and cut and paste code from several (including the subroutines) to create my own scripts. I have yet to see any Perl or CGI book that makes me want to throw all the others away, but this one will be on my desk long after most of the others have gone. (And the book's private support mailing list is frosting on the cake!)

This is obviously a book that a lot of time and care went into, on the part of both authors. The CGI/Perl Cookbook has all of the best "goodies" from the excellent Matt's Script Archive website on its CD-ROM, and a chapter on each of the scripts carefully walks you through every line, explaining (in refreshingly non-technogeek language!) the programming theory behind each element and how the total script works. I found this very useful when I began writing my own Perl scripts.

Matt's easy-to-modify CGI scripts are also great for people who don't care *why* it works, they just want it to work. With the excellent documentation Craig and Matt supply, these are as close to foolproof as CGI scripting ("Aaagh! 500 Server Error!!") gets, and all 20 scripts covered in the book are the basic, useful kind that anyone handling websites will want to use sooner or later (guestbook, form mail, feedback, and a really well-designed web store.)

Excellent value; this is the kind of book you'll keep and use for years, whether it's your stepping-stone to writing your own scripts or whether you never want to get more in-depth than just typing in the path to your Perl executable.

No you won't learn from this book because it is a cookbook and like all cookbooks it gives you the recipe. Even the advance user doesn't remember everything and this is wonderful to lookup what you do need. You may be able to find the scripts other places but this saves time which to me is money by having them all in one place. I have this book sitting with the JavaScript cookbook and they both get plenty of use! They make my life easier and I think the book states what it is from the cover. You won't learn "how to " from this book but I don't see anywhere on the book that says you would. A wonderful assest!

There are certain things that a Perl/CGI book should tell you. A short list would include 1/ using "use strict" and "-w" in all your scripts, 2/ using the standard CGI.pm module and 3/ using taint mode to ensure that and data you're reading from the outside world is what you expect it to be. This book contains none of those. When you add to that the fact that Matt Wright is well-known in the Perl community for being a very bad programmer you end up with a book that should be avoided at all costs.

Sure, Matt and Craig explain what they know really well and beginners learn a lot from this book very quickly. But they don't know very much about Perl or CGI. What you'll learn will be full of bad code and misunderstandings about Perl. The worst part is thar Matt and Craig know very little about CGI security and running their scripts on your server leaves you open to a number of attacks from crackers.

Please don't buy this book.

If you are looking for great subroutines, this book is a good reference. Most of the subroutines are very useful and readily available to use from the disk. If you are a new learner in perl or cgi programming, I would strongly suggest reading "learning perl" form O'rielly and cgi.pm book by Lincoln stein before buying this. After you finish those two, this book will make much more sense. I think this book is overpriced considering it's material.

I bought this book looking to learn PERL and to get a couple of cgi's off the ground. This book is perfect, especially since they solve most of the routine CGIs that you might need. With this book I was instantly able to implement a quoting system on the web without having to re-invent the wheel.

Most books spend lots of time explaining how the web works with CGI. Once you get that under your belt, the task ahead is to get something done - and this is just the book to do that.

I found most of the coding to be impractical and amateurish. It contains all the same security flaws that make Matt Wrights scripts so easy to hack and crash the server.

I purchased this book in 1999 with the intention of developing my CGI skills and implement CGI programs in my website projects. The book does provide 20 usefull CGI scripts that one can fool around with, since there is a line by line explanation of all the scripts, I could figure out what makes it tick without having to actually learn perl.

On the Good Side:
1. Explanation of the scripts, line by line.
2. 20 Ready to use sripts and a few subroutines.
3. HTML Templates for using the scripts.
4. A website with updates and a forum.

On the Not so Good Side:
1. All the scripts are quite rudimentary, very basic operations.
2. You need to know how to configure the script to work in the server. This is where you will spend most of your time, yet little documentation on this subject is provided.
3. The website referred by the book is never updated.

Overall, I think it is a good book for someone who wants to jump into CGI for the first time, is tenacious, and is ready to invest a good amount of hours figuring things out on his own.

The book is just serveral scripts, written in Perl 4 style. The book goes line by line to comment on those scripts, which themselves are not very inspiring. The library section contains functions such as getting domain name from an IP, which is trivial and code of which can be found on the net. It does not address harder issues such as file-uploading, etc. CPAN is a better place for code like this.