Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Cgi Programming With Perl in a Week (Sams Teach Yourself)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Recently, after examining a number of CGI/Perl type books, I purchased a wonderful instructional book titled,"Teach Yourself CGI Programming with Perl in a Week" by Eric Herrman. I had no prior experience with CGI or Perl, but had gained an interest in the subject after talking to several friends at my work place. After reading this book, I have written several CGI scripts that are currently being used in my department. This book is organized into seven lessons that correspond to the seven days of the week. I found day one (the introduction) to be a little technical and over my head, but the author explained that this information would be covered in detail in the Chapters to follow. Once I made it to day two I was on the road to becoming a CGI script programmer. The Author makes excellent use of visuals andworking programs to explain how Web Pages interact with CGI Scripts and then back to the Web. The author explained that he chose Perl as the language for writing the CGI scripts because it works well with UNIX environments, but the scripts could be written in a number of languages. Upon completion of this book I felt very comfortable with Perl as a primary programming language and would highly suggest this book to anyone that is interested in programming with the Web. My only suggestion to anyone that is considering to purchase this book is that unless they have a lot of spare time, be prepared to spend more than one week to complete this book. I read this book in my leisure after work and I estimate that it took me two weeks to complete the reading and feel confident in my knowledge.

The amount of snotty, degrading comments on this book can only lead me to believe that the authors were not able to grasp the simplest of instructions and are taking their anger out on this book.

Quite simply, this is an INCREDIBLE book; well-written, funny, and comprehensive. Not only do you learn about CGI, you also learn Perl, SSI, some nice HTML tricks and lots of information about web servers.

The CD includes full websites, tons of scripts, and lots of basic programs you'll need if you plan to set up your own server.

GET THIS BOOK! You won't regret it. *Unless you're too dense to read simple english...*

this book is so all over the place, you'll need to make your own personal table of contents to make any sense of it. The book seems like a rush job, pieced together by pages of unrelated information. If you feel like having your head spin and ending up with a migraine, check it out! I'd be ashamed to be the author.

My copy of this book is an earlier edition entitled "Teach Yourself CGI Programming with Perl in 21 Days." This is good book for those who arleady have some basic knowledge of html and perhaps some experience getting perl scripts to run on a web server. I'm not sure if it would be easy enough for a complete beginner in this area. It was very helpful for me in learning about what goes on behind the scenes when scripts run on a web server, how environment variables work, etc. If you want a clearer understanding of how scripts actually work, get this book. If you are just interested in getting the script to work, and maybe tweaking it a little to your purposes, you probably don't need this.

Not the best desktop reference book and not the best straight up learning manual, this book combines strong elements of each.

Once you are comfortable working with CGI and Perl (which this book will either teach your or assist greatly in achieving) you will still find yourself cracking the cover often for those things that are right on the tip of your brain but you just can't quite remember.

With the help of this book, I mastered CGI and was well on the way to my mastery of Perl. It shouldn't be the only CGI or Perl book in your library, but it is a powerful addition.

I'm inclined to agree with the reviews above that stated that this is NOT a good book for total newbies to cgi and Perl. On the whole I found it very useful but think I would not have benefitted from it so much if I didn't already have some CGI/Perl experience. The whole is biased towards UNIX which means shell commands such as Date, Time and Mail will not work without substantial modification if you're trying to run this on a Win 32 system. In addition there are a number of inaccuracies with some of the book source scripts on the enclosed CD (misdeclared variables, missing brackets etc) compounded by the fact that in one or two instances the printed script is not the same as the one on the CD. On the whole a good resource for intermediate scripters but it requires more than a little work if you are to get the most from it.

GGI / perl in a week? That's marketing for you. If the publisher put the truth in the title, maybe "CGI/Perl in 2 months and you will still be struggling" it wouldn't sell as much but it would be more realistic, unless you already have strong programming skills, which I do not.

I brought this book almost 3 years ago and I do not regret it. I wasn't new to CGI, but I think the book is good for both novices and professionals alike.

Many responses criticised this book - read these carefully. Many books contain history. Ok so there is a CGI script missing ? Show me a book that doesn't. I couldn't believe the webmaster who thinks there is nothing to show how to write a CGI script. Did he read the book ???

Seriously - does anybody considering buying this book think that it's not going to tell you how to write a CGI script ???

A reader remarks that he has lot's of experience of Web Design but this book is not for beginners. But the review from the beginner says this book is great.

I felt this book was good only up to it's halfway point, where it strays from actually teaching you PERL techniques, to other things which have little to no relevance. Not saying that the first half was any good, either - the program sources themselves were riddled with continuity errors. Variable names changed from one reference to another in the same program. The author also took very little time to make sure the reader understood what was going on; too often he would cite code 'snippets' that did exactly what they were supposed to do, but then didn't tell you how to fit them together to actually make them WORK. I suggest O'Reilley's Animal Series CGI book (easily idenifiable in the bookstores with their animals on the cover and black-and-cyan colors) as an alternative to this one.

This book is not for an amatuer!

Do not try to become a programmer with this book!

Although, if you are already a programmmer in any language, you will surely be able to learn the BEST internet programming scripting language with this book.

This book showed me the POWER of using a scripting language. PERL is power! Although, you will really need to get a PERL book to be proficient in PERL. (If you can get your hands on the 4th edition SAMS: Teach Yourself PERL in 21 Days, BUY IT (it's out of print, and just phenomenal!) Or, maybe buy a book from Larry Wall. I still am not convinced if the Camel is the way to go.)

Most academicians shun at what these "inferior" (scripting) languages can do. (I know fist hand). But, after coming from a very rigorous and fully declared school of thought, I know that PERL can do better things with less lines of code.

Granted, PERL is not the panacea, but it almost always gets the job done with alot less!

One thing in particular about this book that disturbed me was that it skimped the database section.

Make no mistake about it! If you do have a heavy volume site on the net, you will need to have a very well versed DBA to take of business on this front. Thus far, I have not read a book that genuinely deals with database Internet intensive sites (Especially nothing dealing with the tradeoff of web transmittal time vs. database access time). This book only deals with flat files. (From what I hear, flat files are fine upto about 200 records)

In a Nutshell: this book is worth it for the experienced programmer that is trying to pickup a new skill set.