Customer Reviews

CGI Programming with Perl

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

While there're a few boooks available on CGI/Perl, what's different in this book you'd ask. If we compare it with "CGI Programming 101" by Jaqueline, it's more advanced and excersices better programming style. Uses 'strict' pragma and -wT switches ALL THE TIME, which I liked a lot. The programs are also compatible in mod_perl enviroment, which prove the fluency of the authors in Perl and Web Programming. Unfortunately their those capabilities don't make them good writers. They don't spend enough time on some of the concepts they introduce. They sepend more time and space then requried on JavaScript(chapter 7), which is about 23 pages, and spend only 16 pages on Data Persistence (chapter 10). But in Data Persistence chapter they tried to cover Text files, all kinds of file lockings, temporary files, DB_File, MLDBM, SQL, DBI. Now you have a rough picture of how dEtAiLeD their topisc are. Here I'll try go over chapters with comments and will be suggesting alternatives for the topic wherever it's applicable

Chapter 1, 2 and 3 give some history of the WWW and CGI. Also provide a smaple CGI application for getting started. I think chapter 2, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol" was pretty informative, and I ejoyed it a lot.

Chapter 4, "Forms and CGI" go over some form anatomy and elementary ways of encoding and decoding form input, which you might find usefull.

Chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to CGI.pm and it's application. I still think CGI.pm's documentation available online (or with your Perl distribution) does way better job than this one chapter.

Chapter 6, "HTML Templates" gives some nice examples of HTML::Template and Embperl usage. They spend good space on these, but only about 3 pages to cover Mason. Of course, the chapter can't take you too far without the original documentations of those mentioned libraries which are available online.

Chapter 7, as I mentioned was dedicated to JavaScript and JS validation. I think they were not supposed to spend so much time on JavaScript. For this one, go get JavaScript Bible, 4th edition by Danny Goodman.

Chapter 8, Security covers the security guidelines already available online as W3C's security FAQ by L. Stein and John Stewart.

Chapter 9, "Sending Email" was probably my favorite. It covers 'sendmai', mailx and mail and procmail. Spends good 18 pages on the topic and shows an examile that uses Mail::Mailer

Chapter 11, Maintaining State, was really poor. There's nothing much to learn in that chapter. For more profesional session management examples, I suggest you "MySQL and Perl for the Web" by Paul DeBois and Apache::Session manual available online.

Chapter 12, "Searching the web" give some advanced examples of web searching. The example of Inverted Index Search using DB_File was my favorite.

Chapter 13, "Creating Graphics on the fly" give some examples of dynamic graphic generation using GD, Image::Magick and GD::Graph. I could give this chapter hmmm... 3 stars :)

Chapter 14, "Middleware and XML" was the one I just skipped over.

The last 3 chapters of the book are dedicated to debugging, coding with style and eficiency with mod_perl and FastCGI.
For debugging and style, I recommend "Programming perl 3rd edition".

Overall, i benefitted from the book a lot as it implies from my review. But still wanna save my 5 stars for the 3rd edition :)

This book is full of typos, which is forgivable if the code examples don't have typos, but they do. For instance, in the code for upload.cgi on pg 99, the following declaration is made:

use constant UPLOAD_DIR => "/usr/local/apache/data/uploads";

Note this does NOT end with a slash. Later, though, a loop is initialized as follows:

until (sysopen OUTPUT, UPLOAD_DIR . $filename, O_CREAT | O_EXCL)

$filename is taken from user form input, but unless the user was omniscient and put a slash at the beginning of the name he assigned, then the expression "UPLOAD_DIR" . $filename would evaluate to something like:

/usr/local/apache/data/uploadsbleedin_file_name

instead of the correct: ".../uploads/bleedin_file_name". Oh, and speaking of putting a slash at the beginning of the file name....there is code that is supposed to prevent such, as evidenced by the line:

error($q, "Invalid file name; files must start with a letter or number.");

I don't know about slashes, but it didn't prevent me from sending a file name through that begin with a tilde.

Yes the book covers some things you won't find anywhere else, but a lot of the stuff it covers is better covered elsewhere: OReilly's "Webmaster in a NutShell" has better coverage of HTTP. It (Webmaster) also discusses using the use statement to reference a library in a path where you might have had to manually install it in your virtual hosting directory if for instance you couldn't convince your ISP to upgrade to the latest version of CGI.pm. This wasn't covered in the CGI book, which is supposed to be solely about CGI, whereas the Webmaster book not only covers CGI/Perl, but also JavaScript, PHP, etc.

Don't waste your money....I'm sorry I did

You must be careful when usign this book. I found myself wasting a lot of time typing (oreilly's ftp site was down, and has been down lately--what can I say?) and implementing the examples in the book only to get to the end of the chapters to find out that the authors were holding out on me for a better solution. For example: Parsing forms? Don't implement anything on Chapter 4, "Decoding Form Input." Wait until the next chapter about CGI.pm. Searching the web server (Chapter 12)? Wait until the end of the chapter before implementing anything, or waste alot of time.

Don't get me wrong, this book has some decent information in it. And there is much learning to be done in reviewing how NOT to do certain things. However, I'm not sure how many people read CGI books from cover to cover.

Bottom line: the authors should have been more mindful of their audience's time constraints and should have tailored the exposition of material accordingly.

The author states up front that you should know the perl language. If you know perl, you might enjoy this book. If you don't know perl, don't buy this book.

I found the orginization of the book to be clunky. The book didn't flow well from topic to topic. Having a basic knowledge of CGI, I was able to wade my way through it and understand what the author was trying to convey. If I was a beginner, I would have a hard time grasping the concepts.

In short, buy this book if you are already familiar with perl and CGI programming. If you are a beginner with CGI programming, look for another book.

I purchased "CGI Programming with Perl" thinking it was, like many O'Reilly books, a bible of programming how-to for the working programmer. It's not. What it is, in fact, is a pretty good introduction to writing CGIs with Perl for someone who has some basic knowledge of Perl and HTTP, but who has never done any CGI programming. And that's just the position I was in when I bought it.

The first third of the book is introductory in nature, with an introduction to how forms and CGI scripts work, some discussion of parsing forms in other languages, and some simple examples. The bulk of the book contains more complex examples of tasks like writing questionaires, interfacing with relational databases, maintaining state, graphics and so forth. I did glean a lot of useful information there.

The biggest problem with this book is a problem that's really common to all book on Internet programming: Standards are changing so fast that a year old book is likely to contain chapter upon chapter illustrating obsolete techniques and libraries. In "CGI Programming" there are a lot of examples using Perl modules that haven't really caught on, while some of the newer modules (obviously) aren't meantioned. Another problem is that the book is kind of scattershot in the attention it gives different topics.

Still, I think this is one of the better books for someone with basic Perl skills looking to get started with CGIs. There's enough detail here to start writing CGIs, and enough information out there on the web to go on learning.

This book is great for people who are starting out programming in CGI. A beginner's knowledge of Perl is required to get the full benefits of the book. I found the authors to be very objective and they touch upon every aspect of CGI. Unfortunately, due to space limitations I suppose, they cannot get too deep into any one topic. That is why this book is good for new comers to CGI. It will show you everything you need to know to get started with writing CGI scripts. They make reference to other books that go deeper into a particular topic (albeit from O'Reilly) throughout the book. I found this book to be an excellent learning tool for someone who is building his or hers first web site based on CGI/Perl. It reads well, explains topics well, and is good at getting right to the point.

I'm a avid reader of O'Reily Publications. The majority of their books provide a thorough and complete explanation and examples of how to and why you are doing something. This book gave a very general touch of the major aspects of the Common Gateway Interface. However, the book assumes that you have a solid understanding of Perl and suggests that you look at other books for deeper understanding of the programming concepts. A newbie at Perl will find themselves making constant trips to his bookshelf to look something up to make sense out of what the book is saying. So all in all the title is a bit missleading as this book is really more about concepts in CGI mixed with some simple examples, but fails on really covering the "programming" part of it.

I've done many perl/CGI scripts. I've tried to find a really solid book on teaching me how to write a good perl/CGI script. But most of the book only teach you how to program CGI without teaching you why.

This is it!

The title is damn right. This is a book about CGI programming. Perl is the major language used in this book but not the main purpose of this book. You will learn a solid background about HTTP and CGI. You might need another Perl book to learn how to program perl, but you definetly will know how CGI works in this book.

Thank you, o'reilly!

This is an okay book, but there's not much there. If you already know Perl and a little about CGI, there's not much to be had from this book. Learning Perl, Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook (The O'Reilly one) will complete everything you need to know. This doesn't do much for you.

I grabbed this book after reading a review on slashdot.org that rated it a 9 out of 10.

When I saw some of the reviews here I had second thoughts, but fortunately I trusted slashdot. Someone here complained that the book talks about using modules, like CGI.pm. It does - there's a whole chapter devoted to CGI.pm, but the following chapter talks about another way to write CGIs: HTML templates (like Embperl, Mason, HTML::Template, etc.).

This is an example of how balanced the book is. In both chapters the authors explain that different programmers have different preferences. Instead of only presenting one way of creating HTML output (or ignoring CPAN entirely like other CGI books), they present all the popular options. That lets you choose what works best for you (hey, Perl's slogan is TIMTOWTDI... there is more than one way to do it). Also, now I thorougly know how CGI.pm and Embperl work, and even though I might not use them for the scripts I write from scratch, it helps if I find myself working on a project that does use them (and lots do).

This book doesn't just teach you CGI one way, like most other CGI books, and it doesn't promote certain technologies. Instead, it's very complete and the authors clearly show they have lots of experience with CGI.