Customer Reviews

Cgi for Commerce: A Complete Web-Based Selling Solution

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is for anyone who knows some PERL and wants to save days or weeks coding a shopping cart/ordering system. It could most accurately be described as a detailed, line by line description of a complex (but NOT overly complicated) free software application which is provided on the book's cd-rom.

Just remember that you must know some basic PERL and have already set up a few simple websites on a UNIX server, otherwise you will be lost. If you want to learn PERL, this is as good a project as any, but remember that you will be thumbing through a PERL book at the same time. If you are an intermediate level PERL hacker, you should have the basic demo application up and running in a couple of hours, max.

The program is very good and extremely easy to customize to your exact needs. The book is marred by some typos, inconsistancies and embarrasing grammatical errors, but is an absolutely invaluable resource for anyone wanting an excellent, cheap and flexible PERL based CGI shopping cart on their website.

Very nice information if I want to go to programmers school. Needs more of a what if content. No real trouble shooting. It has taken me almost 6 months to understand and it will take another six to setup on my server.

It covers graphic generation, file access, DB management, security transaction. E-mail access... Enough topics, good details. There is a shopping-cart example, gives good reference for writing complex cgi program.

Using this "free" solution for a professional web store won't save you any money. These scripts are incomplete and written in Perl4 so they don't take advantage of all that Perl5 has to offer. I have spent countless hours and hundreds of dollars hiring programmers to correct and finish this set of scripts for a client's web site.

The book is interesting to read and you will learn some foundations of Perl programming (if you can get past the spelling, grammatical, and CODE typos). But the old adage applies here: You get what you pay for. There are better solutions for complete online commerce solutions. They just cost a bit more.

This book is based solely on the program that comes on CD-Rom with the book. So before you will understand what the book is talking about you have to install the files on your server. The book makes most of the installation part a huge guessing game. When you finally get it installed, check if it works. If your lucky you won't have to call your Hosting Service to have any little extra services turned on just to get the program running. Now that you have it WORKING right and you move on to the rest of the book, your stuck with a very unattractive web site. Help on customizing this cgi is another guessing game. All in all I say this book was very vage and really doesnt get down to the nitty gritty on web commerce. It's almost as if they are trying to get you to use thier program for some reason, which by the way is out dated and you'll have to download a newer version online.

The book claimed that you could download the latest software from the website and that there is a windows version as well as the unix version available for download. After not being able to find the windows version for download I sent email to the author inquiring where I could find the windows version. I was then emailed back with a long email claiming that they were very busy and that if I wanted support I would have to pay $300.00! I then emailed them back saying that I only bought the stupid book and only wanted to know where the windows download was. I then got email stating how to get the unix version working on the windows platform.

If you do not already understand the basics of PERL programming, web server operations, and CGI, this book might help you and it may just confuse you. If you do already understand these things pretty well, then the book is both enlightening and entertaining. I downloaded the unix software first, and had it running under apache on Windows 98 in about 5 minutes. I was so impressed with the quality and flexibility of the code, I decided to buy the book just to show my support, and pick up the helpful hints and insightful commentary that Gunther, et al have on the web, ecommerce, and programming in general. Well, well done!

A book that give to the siftware people a big understanding of web commerce. I apreciated the generous style that the autor offer to the reader.

Selena & Gunther's book offers all the information they 'forgot' to put in the documentation for their scripts. Guess they're just following in Microsoft's footsteps?

In any case, it's a fairly well written book, and certainly solved at least a few of the problems I had with their shopping cart. I just hope they get around to updating the pgp portion of the script, to accept newer versions.

Other reviews may slam this book and the included scripts, but I found the scripts to be documented very well and if one takes the time to read... it will all make sense. Well done! KUDO's