Customer Reviews

CGI Programming 101

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I come from a graphic design background and got into web design about 4 years ago. Most of my programming experience has been with Cold Fusion , JavaScript, and HTML. I wanted to learn Perl because I was tired of the limitations of my knowledge base and the frustrating idiosyncrasies of the Windows NT systems and applications that I was enslaved to. After dozens of other Perl books I stumbled onto Ms. Hamilton's.

This is the perfect book for a beginner. She painlessly takes the reader into the very powerful and liberating language of Perl and immediately shows you how to incorporate it into your web designs. She is a fantastic teacher. Her code works and the examples are real world.

If you are new to Perl and CGI, not a programmer, know HTML, and are totally confused as to where to start, start with this book and then go on to the O'Reilly book. "Learning Perl, 2nd Edition".

I also recommend signing up for an account with Hamilton's web hosting company CGI101.com for the following reason. Her hosting site is very CGI friendly and all the scripts work flawlessly on her system. That way you won't freak out if something is wrong with your code and spend all your time thinking "Is it my code, is it the book's screwed up examples, or is the ISP configured in a way that makes these scripts not work?"

If you're on her ISP everything works the way it's supposed to from the book. So the learning experience is much faster.

Take it from someone who has learned everything about computers the hard way and has had no "gurus" available to help. This book packs more in its 200 pages than 99% of all the other 1000+ page books on Perl that litter book store shelves.

I hope Ms. Hamilton publishes a sequel, and possibly books on other internet topics. She is a gifted writer and instructor.

I found this book to be an extremely helpful reference. If I needed to do something quickly, I knew I could just look it up here. However, if you are looking for a comprehensive Perl tutorial, consider getting the "Learning Perl" O'Reilly book as well. I have found that these two books go well together - CGI 101 when I need a quick reference, and Learning Perl when I actually need to really understand the key elements of the script I'm writing.

CGI 101 also offers a great introduction to MySQL database programming. If you're new to MySQL and plan to use it, use CGI 101 as your reference but pick up a copy of "MYSQL" by Paul DuBois as well.

With these three books I have created an intranet that uses the Perl DBI to maintain an interactive, database-driven environment with approximately 225 users. It took me about a month. CGI 101 helped me out immensely along the way. 5 stars!

When I first picked up this book, I was surprised to see that it was only 210 pages. But those pages are filled great information. I learned more from this book that I have from books three times the size. This book has expanded my skills from an HTML coder to a novice Perl programmer in less than a week. If you already understand HTML and a little JavaScript, this book will teach you the basics of Perl and help you create CGI forms and database front-ends very quickly. I hope Hamilton writes "CGI Programming 102."

Although this book is only 224 pages, it is supplied with lots of(believe me, with lots of) useful information that other books out there lack. At the same time, I wouldn't call it an ideal CGI book for the reasons that I'll get into below.

My first CGI book was Elizabeth Castro's quick start guide, which does a good job on regex(very good job on regex) and other "getting started" stuff; better than this book's coverage.

But Jacqueline gets as deep as making use of perl modules, and creating those of your own. Even introduces mySql database manipulation with DBI, which I found very usefull. List of SSI elements in Chapter 9 is definitely worth the praise. The whole beauty of perl's taint checking is also explained thoroughly. The book doesn't cover the Formatting capabilities of perl in details, but still it's more detailed than that of Elizabeth Castro's.

Although CGI PROGRAMMING 101 does supply the reader with enormous useful information, in some cases I felt that I needed a little more detailed explanation of the topic. Especially her examples of using DBI and GD were lack of sufficient explanation (of course all the codes worked fine). There's a section called object orientedness(Chp 17), but don't expect much. There's nothing much to discover in there if you're concerned with OOP(except the phrase. "Object Oriented" in case you've never heard it).

If you are a little bit familiar with CGI/Perl or came from a programming background such as C, awk, seed and etc. go ahead and buy this book. If you're a novice, Elizabeth Castro's quick start guide could be a good choice (I hope). But even though you buy Elizabeth Castro's, you'll need another book after that, which probably, will be CGI PROGRAMMING 101.

If CGI programming is more than your hobby. After the aforementioned books, go for Larry Wall's Camel (Programming Perl), 3rd edition, which is concidered Perl's Bible (from the Perl's author).

I have only some basic programming experience. I wanted to go beyond HTML and bought some books including Perl & CGI for the WWW by Elizabeth Castro.

CGI 101 does not waste any time getting you started. But the pace remains easy and steady. This book teaches with examples. The author does not explain all the theory behind Perl and the example scripts. But the examples are kept very simple and illustrate their point really well. Sometimes I did wish for a little more explanation of certain lines in the example scripts. But the author does not attempt to force too much on you all at once. Advanced topics are introduced by going back and applying them into the earlier basic scripts really beautifully. What's special about this book is that it keeps things so simple that you will just read and go "Aha! So that's how they do it." You will want to sit down and try out the examples straightaway. I was pleased to find out that this little book covers almost all the things you may want to do on your website including connecting and using databases. For a programming book I really enjoyed reading this one! Definitely worth more than the low price.

I've gone through three or four other Perl books looking for one that would help me actually write the Perl scripts I want for my site. This book is perfect. It presents the concepts simply, but completely. I'm an experienced coder, but not in Perl and too many books either didn't answer my questions or bogged down in unimportant details. I have every confidence that I'll finally be able to write the web apps I've been dreaming of. As a bonus, the companion web site is very helpful (I've actually been waiting for this book ever since I saw the web site).

I needed to learn CGI scripting for the web in a hurry and this got me going. It took me from knowing very little about web scripting to having a good understanding and working knowledge of CGI.

CGI 101 serves as a paradigm for any intro to programming course/book. The text is very easy to follow, and filled with useful examples from the start. Within a day or so of having read the first few chapters, I was actually programming, and understanding the "whys" of what I was doing. Because of the foundation I now have from reading this book, I am able to write scripts that have proved useful at work and for personal projects. Thanks to Jackie Hamilton for a wonderful job! Others considering writing an intro to programming book, read this book, and use it as a model.

Can't wait to see future releases from this author!

As an experienced software programmer with no previous knowledge of Perl and the need to get some website scripts operational quickly, I found this book truly amazing. If you don't know anything about programming, though, it's probably not the place to start. I loved this book.

A complete book for all about CGI programming, specially for beginners. It's clear and has a lot of real examples.