Customer Reviews

Cgi How-To: The Definitive Cgi Scripting Problem-Solver

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This is a 1996 book still being sold in year 2000 and that says something about it. It is a very useful book in many respects. A whole lot of the stuff in it is as useful today as it was in 1996. However, just for perspective, Win 3.1 was still the dominant Windows platform back then, and there was no Microsoft browser (or server, for that matter) in general use -- Netscape was it. In fact, the index shows Win 3.1 and NT 4.0 (no Win 95) and there's not even an index entry for Microsoft! (There are for Netscape, Mac, etc.) The short list of potential programming errors is still useful, and the security risks listed are things you always have to have in the back of your mind. I think the book would be most useful if you were going use it in a site where not a whole lot had changed recently or where there was not much money for newer technology. They do provide scripts for such things as a shopping cart and it makes you wonder how many e-commerce sites on the web right now basically just loaded up the scripts from the CD-ROM as a starting point. I found the book useful, but as a consultant my needs are not those of someone who writes Perl for a living.

This book starts off with a bang, showing the reader how to transfer client data and decode it at the server. CGI cripts are built up in a step-by-step method easily comprehended by a beginning Perl user (me) and in most cases are translated into the equivalent convolutions of C; the comparison of the two sets of code make the utility of Perl dramatically apparent. "CGI How-To" is an effective practical companion to Larry Wall's "Perl Programming", which is complete but often theoretical in nature.

CGI is the heart of what makes web-sites and can be useful for other projects. You do not need a book for simple application as you can just cut and paste with a fairly educated guess. But the day will come when you will want to know what you are doing and why. More still, when you are confronted with a unique application that cannot just be cut and pasted.

This book is very comprehensive and come with a CD if you remember what a CD is. There is example in Perl and c. is aware if you go down the Perl rout that that animal is proprietary when it comes to outside help. Of course the book itself has practical examples and monochrome screen shots.

There is a good deal of valuable information here for the intermediate perl programmer, but no online errata sheet is provided, and the book is not flawless. Plan on spending a fair amount of time debugging on your own.

A very good book for beginners and anvanced CGI programmers. However I would have liked all examples to include C code as well as PERL

CGI How-To: The Definitive CGI Scripting Problem-Solver empowers you with the ability to solve your CGI maladies. With support for Windows NT scripts, this book is a wonderful resource for your bookshelf. If you author Web resources this book will assist you in becoming more advanced. If it is not on your shelf, it will be soon. Try it out. Bo

I found the book not very rewarding to read, and I feel the writers try to explain too much. So I found a lot of material I could have come up with myself, and just a few new things. By explaining everything rightaway, they take away all the challenge and excitement from the programming and reading.
The books q/a approach doesn't really appeal to me either and the fact that not all examples are available in C as they are in perl, is (to me as a C programmer) simply unforgivable.
A good reference manual for only C would have been more usefull to me.
I stopped reading the book after the first two chapters and have used the questions with the first few lines of explanation as programming exercises. So it wasn't totally useless afterall ;)