Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself - CGI Programming in a Week

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

 

 

There is a lot of practical knowledge here, but not for the absolute beginner. If you are a beginning C or Perl programmer, this book will help you to write useful real-world CGI scripts in a matter of days. If you have less than rudimentary knowledge of these languages, spend time learning the languages before you buy this book.

Most CGI tasks are not especially complex, so you can start writing useful scripts with minimal programming knowledge. To gain that knowledge, look to books like O'Reilly's "Learning Perl," which not only gives you a very solid understanding of the language, but also has a good chapter to get you started in CGI scripting.

What this book is good for is learning about things like how information is passed from a web page to a CGI script, how the CGI script interprets that info, how the script connects to databases and other programs on the back end.

Unlike many of the other Sam's "Teach Yourself" books, this one does not really start with simple scripts and lead you by the hand up to the more complex stuff. Instead, it spends more time explaining how Perl & C work with CGI & HTML to send, receive & process information. Once you've written your first few Perl scripts, this information will be exactly what you need. Before then, however, you may just find it confusing.

I have bought 5 CGI books, only this one does teach me something from the beginning. By reading through the first chapter, I fully understand the structure of a site, what is the document root, why index page in the /usr/local/http/htdocs directory is automaticlly loaded if www.xxxx.com is used, as well as why cgi-bin is treated as in the same directory under the document root as your html document eventhough the cgi-bin is one level higher than htdocs, etc, ... These are all the questions I have in my mind since I started to learn CGI, this book enlightened me starting in the first chapter! (Certainly not only one chapter can do all). No other books take a approach as this one to teach you from the very beginning, which is very crucial to any one who is new to CGI I believe. This is a book for any one who wants to learn CGI from the very beginning. But I think if you have some html and unix knowledge, it would be much easier for you to quickly learn CGI by reading this book. I have one year html experience and know some basic unix and perl, I feel very comfortable reading through this book and finished with it just in a week. If you are looking for some advanced CGI, maybe O'Reilly's "Programming in CGI" will do much better for you.

This was the second book I purchased in my quest to master Perl. The first being Perl and CGI For The World Wide Web, by Elizabeth Castro. I recommend that if you are a beginner start with something other than Teach Yourself - CGI Programming in a Week. Though not a total waste of money ( I have found it to be useful as a desktop reference. ) It will not be the last book you will ever need to purchase on your way to mastering Perl and the CGI protocol. On the bright side it does spend a fair amount of time discussing Server Side Includes, which come in handy when developing dynamic web applications. Finally, be prepared to purchase Programming Perl- by Larry Wall to truly master the language. GOOD LUCK

Although there are a lot of books about CGI, few seem to be any good. In my opinion, this one fits neatly in the lower end of the spectrum. This book is basically is a simplistic introduction, provided that you already know Perl. Almost all of the examples are written in Perl.

1/3rd of the book's content are appendices (MIME types, response codes, environment variables, and a CGI Perl Quick Reference).

Still, it is a usable introduction to CGI with examples.

I went out and bought this book becuase I saw it and glansed at it and I liked what I saw. This book will take you threw all the basics in CGI. By the end of the seven days, I was programming all these awsome things in perl. Right now, just from the knowledge I aquired from this book I was able to create my own internet advertising company using over 10,000 lines of pure Perl code.

I feel this book will get you on your feet and get you doing the majority of the things you want to get done. I was a bit skeptacle about the whole "Sams" books and how everybody says they are crap and they have very bad editing and stuff. Well I went through this book, and there are a few misprints, but the book is still a very good and you will not be disappointed if you get this one, although if you want to get truly serious in CGI you will need to get a reference book in Perl or whatever language, but this will get you on your way making amazing and great usefull CGI programs.

The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 stars was because I felt this book would have been better if they made it a "Sams teach yourself CGI Programming in 21 days" instead of a shorter 7 day course. That way they could have taken many subjects into more depth, but besides that, it covers a lot (even SQL). I have read reviews on other sams books and many people say that sams is very bad. Well some were true, but this book from Sams is a great book and a must have.

Although I do not have any Perl experience, I found this book just great to get understanding about CGI concepts and environment. I did not expect such a good book from SAMS. Must have!

This has begginer level content, although is too complex for any begginer. Only purchase this book if you already know C and Perl, and have no knowledge of CGI.

There are much better simple free tutorials online that could describe the basis of CGI.

I work for a software company writing CGI programs in Perl for their Intranet site. Of about 10 books I have concerning CGI, this is the one that always answers my question.

Ideal for both beginner and advanced programmer, Teach Yourself CGI Programming in a Week shows you how to create dynamic websites using CGI. No longer do you web pages need to be static - now you can create interactive pages that breathe life into a site. This fast paced book will get you up to speed with CGI programming, teaching you both the theory and practical techniques you need to write your own CGI applications and scripts.

Each chapter introduces a new topic, such as forms, scripts, server-side-includes (SSI), graphics, databases and security. As you progress from chapter to chapter, you'll be amazed at just how easy CGI programming can be. The examples in the book are clearly explained, and help demonstrate the practical applications of CGI programming. The book includes examples in Perl 5, and C, so whether you're a C or a PERL programmer, this book will be of benefit. Examples range from small pieces of code to large applications. The examples are of real ! ! practical use for webmaster such as counters, guestbooks, email gateways and WWW forms that access and record information in a database. There's even source code for a flat-file database, for those webmasters who don't have an existing database system installed on their site.

Teach Yourself CGI Programming in a Week offers programmers and webmasters the opportunity to master CGI applications in a very short period of time, and to effectively deploy "real-world" CGI applications on their website. The techniques are described in plain, simple language, and are backed up by example code. If you're looking for an easily accessible book, and want to put CGI programming to use quickly, this book is for you!

Be aware of bookstore reviews as the one before! About this book. After spending half the book about nothing - just descriptive and empty introduction, nothing hands on - exactly the type the beginner has no use for, the author writes examples that cannot be used. If you want to learn practical way (usable and meaningfull examples with hands on approach, what a beginner needs) this is not a book for you. It is certainly not for an expert either. Shortly - worthless. Add here bug full source from web site and you really have a headache. Learning curve - none, you won't learn anything, is that easy.