Customer Reviews

60 Minute Guide to Cgi Programming With Perl 5

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This 260 page book does what it needs... teaches you Perl from scratch and covers all the basic topics you need to write the scripts explained: write a web based clock, a basic page template parser (something that all programmers need to use more), processing forms (without using some large and slow 3rd party library), create a form based emailer webpage, a search engine, an app to grab other webpages to store them in a database and to search them, and finally a catalog/e-commerce script. This is a good starter book to go from nothing to intermediate programmer without feeling overwelmed with the material read.

This book is good for individuals who have experience with HTML, UNIX, and some programming experience. It caters to people who have played a little with Perl programming, and want to learn more. It should be noted, however, that if you have no Perl experience, it will take much longer than 60 minutes to bring you up to speed.

This book was a quick tour of Perl. Well-written but has typos (and I had to figure these out with no prior knowledge of Perl!) and only a few of the examples I tried actually worked. I use it as a general Perl reference now but it is totally geared towards UNIX and we have a Novell webserver. Minimal help there. This book is primarily useful in that it's not overly intimidating like some other Perl primers. Just a so-so text for me but probably very useful if you plan to only work in UNIX.