Customer Reviews

CGI Programming with Visual Basic 5

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

 

 

First, I should note that using Visual Basic for a web server application is pathetic. Each instance of the application requires a minimum of 4 megs of RAM, so using it on a high-traffic site is suicidal.

That said, the book and the code in the book are very good. Ported to C, Delphi or especially PowerBASIC, you can't go wrong. The book also does a fairly good job of covering the CGI spec.

My suggestion, buy the book and go get yourself a copy of PowerBASIC so that you can create true CGI apps that take only a few K instead of megabytes.

Visual Basic is absolutely the wrong language to write CGI applications. The overhead required will drag your server down to a crawl.

That said, the book itself is fairly well written with lots of useful information. If you are a CGI programmer in general (C, Delphi or PowerBASIC) then there is some really useful information here. Particularly if you are a PowerBASIC programmer, since PowerBASIC can compile stand-alone executables to just a few 'k-bytes'.

"Deliver CGI applications easily" says the cover of this book. After spending a whole weekend with the book, I could not get past chapter 2. Every example I tried generated confusing error messages. I'm actually using VB 6 instead of 5, and nothing in this 500+ page book suggests whether or not this is allowed. A quick look at the index tells you it is too short for a 500 page book. One of the most popular CGI applications is a counter, however, the word counter does not even appear in the index. Only 2 entries are under the letter "B" in the index. That's what I'd expect from a 20 page book. This book is written in a language that only someone who already knows the subject matter could possibly understand.

Well, in polite terms, somewhat useful but more useless than useful in any way. To be laconic " regretful buy "

My complaint is the first chunk of the book reads like a Microsoft sales brochure. The author is a revisionist who would have you believe without Microsoft there would be no Internet, that VB is the only useful (serious) development tool for the WEB, and that NT has replaced UNIX. Keep in mind that VB5 which purports to be "Object Oriented", doesn't have inheritance.

Revisionist Example: "Programming tools and other utilities for Windows NT were far more standardized, widely used, and popular than their UNIX counterparts." Pg. 21. Maybe that's the world Bill Gates would love to see.

What does this have to do with CGI programming? Nothing. That's my point. Skip the first couple of chapters and you will find some useful programming tips for developing CGI with VB5. Lately I see a lot of authors overtly pitching Microsoft. I have a hunch Microsoft is paying authors to revise history so people who didn't know the Internet was actually invented under UNIX and that for NT it was merely an afterthought, might be duped into thinking it was the other way around.

The book contains useful information and sample code. It is structured as a tutorial, so that most examples build on each other to create a complete application.

Overall, the book is a definite must have if you are trying your hand at CGI for the first time and want to implement a CGI application quickly.

Things that could be better:

The samples have little documentation other than the high level description of the functionality, so it may take some time to go through the sample code and fully understand how it works.

Some subjects are not as in-depth as I expected, such as E-mail and credit card processing.

The problem with this title is its proprietary language. Depending on the server you program for, why would you want to use the Authors version of the interface software. It's well written but lacks being practical.

CGI Programming with Visual Basic 5 is an extensive book that teaches step by step how to create robust applications for the Internet. It contains information on creating search engines, counters, shopping bags, the use of cookies and parameters, and information on debugging and using client side scripting inside your applications. I have really enjoyed this book and personally recommend it to any developer that is interested in developing robust applications for the Internet.