Customer Reviews

CGI Programming 101: Programming Perl for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

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CGI Programming 101 - Perl for the World Wide Web (Second Edition)
by Jacqueline Hamilton
Publisher: CGI101.com
Publication date: 2004
Website: www.cgi101.com

An excellent introduction to Perl programming, good for beginners but also very useful to more experienced programmers who want a quick understanding of Perl and it's capabilities on the web.

Chapters include: Perl variables (including summary list of native variable functions), online forms, file access for read/write operations, server-side includes (SSI), string and arithmetic operators, searching and sorting data, pattern matching (using an email validation expression as an example), database programming (examples given using MySQL), CGI security issues (keeping your scripts secure), and how to password-protect a specific location on your site to create a secure area. For people accessing their scripts on a Unix server, a short appendix shows some common Unix shell commands, which will help you find your way around and set the relevant file permissions etc.

Overall a very well written and nicely designed book, which includes lots of practical examples you can copy and adapt to your own needs.

There is also an excellent accompanying website at www.cgi101.com/book, which has the first six chapters of the book and loads of code examples online for free, and the first six chapters are also downloadable in pdf format for free. I actually wrote my first Perl script from the first six chapters while I was waiting for the book to arrive, which kept me entertained and is a great way to test-drive the book.

One thing to remember as you play, however, is that the file access parameters and permissions required to use shared resources on your server may be different from the examples given in the book. This means the path to your sendmail program, for example, may be different. Some examples may work on one server, but not on another. You will have to check the specific requirements with your server administrator or ISP. If you are familiar with writing web scripts you will already know this, but if you are new to web scripting this is one thing to bear in mind.

I highly recommend this book and accompanying website to anybody interested in learning Perl. I know I will certainly get the max out of my copy, as it has already proven itself. Thank you Jacqui!

One of the nicest (and at times, accursed) aspects of perl is that with a small amount of knowledge, you can do anything. If you have an informal background in programming (so that you have the analytical mindset), you can spend a weekend reading about Perl, then go build anything your heart desires. It'll take more time and be messier than the accomplished programmer's works, but you can do it.

That is exactly what I did with this book. I read the first edition, some six, maybe seven years ago, and then went on to build whatever I wanted. A year or so after reading it, I made a content management system replete with a gui interface that my employers could use. This book was the inspiration for years of Perl code creation, and employment.

Now, you won't learn as much as you would with any of the standard Perl books (such as Programming Perl, by the O'Reilly publishing world), as it's a project based approach to Perl learning. You aren't inundated with theoretics and syntax that you could then apply; instead, you receive the fundamentals, with some useful code snippets that you can put into your own code, and go forth to create.

In short, it is a delightful read, and I highly recommend it to any user who prefers a practical approach to learning, versus a theoretical one. If your aim is to go directly into a Perl programming job, then you may want to look elsewhere, but if you want to be able to build web applications, this is a quick easy read that will provide you with the tools to create all that you might want.

This book is extremely helpful for anyone completely new or clueless on the subject of cgi programming. This was my first book on the subject of cgi's (w/ perl) and honestly, it was the best primer in regular expressions in perl. Let me stress its name is suggestive of the content... that is CGI 101 is for beginners. That was a good thing in my case since I was completely clueless when it came to dynamic web programming. It was my first purchase on the subject and I still consider it the most helpful.

I highly suggest this book for anyone looking for an entry point on the subject of CGI programming.

I am not a professional programmer. But I do manage the website for the specialist engineering company I founded and run. I like to have "hands on" control of this very important window for our company to the rest of the world.

To increase the appeal of our website and increase the hit rate, I wanted to create some interactive web pages so the browsing public can generate specific information about our products, and to give them some useful applications to use which normally would cost significant money to buy. (We gain because they have to come to our website to use the application.)

A little research on Google revealed that Perl fitted the bill as the program of choice to use. Now I needed to learn Perl. A little more research came up with this book. I specifically wanted to work with numbers, creating and solving equations, and this book had a chapter on "Working with Numbers" (Chapter 9) so I bought it.

It took a little while to get the Apache version of Perl for Windows set up on my computer (the author's website could be a little clearer on how to do this)and get the "Hello World!" to come up on the screen. The big breakthrough was to create a little program to add two numbers together via the Internet on my browser. At that point, the main principles had clicked into place and I was away.

Within weeks, I was creating scripts two and three thousand lines long, taking full advantage of the range and power of Perl to draw graphs, create line drawings and solve complex equations. I created a full blown ordering system and database, which uses the web as a common network for my staff who need to access the database from different buildings on the factory site.

Throughout this process, when I needed a solution to a particular programming problem, I usually found it in my well thumbed copy of Jacqueline Hamilton's book. If I found that there was a bug somewhere in a particular routine, a careful re-read of the relevant part in the book usually came up with the reason why it was not working.

The more I programmed with Perl, the more I realised what a great book this is. I unreservedly recommend it for anyone wanting to learn Perl.

I bought this book when I first started designing web pages. That was 5 years ago and I still find this book helpful and easy to use. It is a great starting point for persons interested in web design. It has useful examples (I am still using some of these) to help get started.

I am a neophyte script writer. I needed to learn basic PERL to set-up several web sites.

The book provided me with a very straight forward process to write scripts. As a self instruction book the arrangement and flow of the text was excellent. It was a great accomplishment to see my scripts work the first time. The only trouble that I encountered is when I didn't follow the process steps in writing the scripts.

I highly recommend this book.

I bought the previous edition of this book in 2001 because another reviewer recommended it and mentioned the added bonus of signing up with the CGI 101 hosting service. I bought the book AND started a web site with CGI 101. I have not regretted the past five years. The author has been helpful and communicative during the few occasions when the web site went down.

I can understand how someone who wants to be a guru (like the previous reviewer) would be disappointed, but this book is great for explaining most of the features anyone would need. Check out the [...] web site if you don't want to believe me.

I have purchased several CGI / Perl books and this one is by far the best introductory book for this topic! The author's style of writing makes it very easy to keep up with the content and she explains every detail rather than skipping through some of the more difficult code and letting the reader figure it out for themselves. As well, the examples in the book are fun, interesting, and represent excellent real-life examples that you will likely immediately encounter during your first real-world project rather than have you work on scenarios that you will likely never encounter. The secure login / logout script alone makes this book worth its purchase price! That the sample code is available on the author's website makes testing out and modifying the examples from the book a pleasure!

If I had to make any criticism at all, it would be that some of the examples on the book's website are no longer running correctly. As well, the instructions for setting up your own computer as a CGI server have become somewhat outdated with the latest releases of the required software. Still, the examples work great in actual use and fixing the errors that have arisen in the live code over the years is almost like a real-world lesson on how you will have to maintain your own code in the future.

All in all, I have nothing but high praise for this book--I highly recommend this to anyone new to CGI or Perl!

This was a very good book to learn some Perl applications programming. The approach is more how to do a task rather than reviewing commands etc. I used it as a supplement to a more theoretical book. Very easy to get into and get started.

This book is a great beginners guide as well as a reference booklet for veteran programmers.

Ms. Hamilton's style as an author is unbelieveably clean and understandable.