Teach Yourself - CGI Programming in a Week (Paperback)

by Rafe Colburn (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Because successful Web-site development often straddles multiple standards, tools, and programming languages, it's hard for books on the subject to deliver everything beginners need to get started. This problem often occurs with books on Common Gateway Interface (CGI) development; however, Rafe Colburn's Teach Yourself CGI Programming in a Week does a fine job of providing all the required basics for creating your own CGI scripts.

Written with Unix in mind, the book is careful to show that CGI runs on all of today's server platforms. Early chapters include simple tutorials on HTML and HTTP and show how to invoke CGI scripts. These chapters also consider various languages for CGI development, from industry-standard Perl to C/C++. From there the author moves to the basics of parsing CGI environment variables and building Web-page content dynamically, with discussions on how to use server-side includes and even dynamic graphics.

The author consistently adopts a practical, real-world approach to showing the best of CGI and demonstrating other tools that help CGI work. (His short demonstration on how to use JavaScript to validate user input on the client and leave real processing to server-side CGI is one example of this approach.) In addition, this tutorial is a compendium of the author's helpful hints on CGI security and how to use CGI effectively to create better Web sites. All Webmasters should read his guide to providing custom error pages for broken links.

Later chapters show how to use CGI with databases, which the author admits is not a particularly strong suit of CGI.(The tutorial on the basics of SQL is as good as any.) He surveys the growing field of alternatives to CGI, including active server pages (ASPs), Java Servlets, and NSAPI/ISAPI. The book closes with a listing of Perl basics, from language syntax to regular expressions, making this book a complete tutorial for getting started with the powerful capabilities of CGI.

From Library Journal
SAMs Publishing has four time-linked series letting the reader choose between 14 days, a week, 24 hours, or ten minutes. The times are more a guide to depth of information than a realistic measure of length of study?anyone ever try to read a 200-page book in 10 minutes? Still, the series provides good material for all sorts of beginners. Whether patrons are new to computers, new to a category (e.g., networking), or just new to program upgrade, they will welcome these well-illustrated introductions. If you have a beginner's technology section in your library, any of these books will find welcoming hands. Generally, the "10 Minutes" and "24 Hours" titles on popular topics are the first choice, and you should realize that even the "14 Days" titles are not substitutes for substantial references.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 387 pages
• Publisher: Sams; 1st edition (January 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575213818
• ISBN-13: 978-1575213811
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,237,496 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful if you know a little Perl & C programming, December 29, 1999

By A Customer

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A best book for CGI beginner, January 15, 1999

By A Customer

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a waste of money...But not the only book you will need., April 4, 2000

By A Customer

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