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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Great for learning; dismal for reference; rotten visually, November 29, 1999
The first half of the book is a great tutorial on using the CGI.pm module. There are all sorts of tricks, and Lincoln's explanations are very good. If you want a tutorial, this is it.However, the reference section is a mess. It's not clear how the various functions are grouped, and there are no guides in page headings to tell you where you are as you thumb through. If you're looking for a desktop reference, you're probably better off using the CGI section of "Perl In A Nutshell". Finally, the book looks like it was thrown together in Word, with no real thought about how it would look. Chapter titles are in grey: Why?
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Best Tool for Perl CGI Programming, March 17, 2000
This has been the one most valuable tool I have used for web programming in Perl. It simplifies CGI programming and makes code much, much cleaner. The examples are excellent. The book is shorter than I expected, but a lot is packed into those pages, including everything you need.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent text; questionable typography, September 30, 1998
I've enjoyed this latest book of Lincoln's, and recommend it highly. This is an interesting book with many good examples. I am happily using it as a text in my Programming the World Wide Web classes. This is one of very, very few books on CGI programming that use fluent Perl (Perl 5 constructs in particular) *and* up-to-date language features (CGI.pm, obviously). The only drawback of the book, and the only reason I didn't give it 5 stars, is that I think the typography is lousy. In particular, the font for the code samples is too light, and the excessive leading in general makes the book harder to read. The book has its share of first printing typos, but then again, mine had them too, so I can hardly complain about that. :-) Good work, Lincoln!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent resource for essential perl module., February 21, 2001
If you write CGI scripts in perl and are not taking advantage of cgi.pm, then you're doing things the hard way. Written to take the tedium out of scripting, the module allows you to use easy to remember shortcuts to code some of the more difficult things in perl. Cookie setting and retrival is a snap, as is allowing users to upload files, and more. For advanced programmers, the object oriented method is supported and also very easy to use.The book is easy to follow and contains some illustrative examples that are also available on a companion website. My one and only complaint is the price of the book: it seems a little steep given that most of the material in there is available on the web in one form or another for free. If you don't want to take the time printing and compiling, then this is an excellent manual that will soon sport bookmarks and highlights throughout.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
This book is a necessity but the examples don't all work, May 6, 2003
I must confess that I could do virtually none of the programming that I do without Lincoln's fine work, but it's sometimes frustrating with so many broken examples.Once you figure out the syntax, you'll be OK. There's a lot of easy-to-find reference. Make sure you test very small sections of code on their own and insert it into your programs when you get it working. Then refer to your working programs (copy & paste) when you make others.
Again, much credit needs to be given to Mr Stein, but Paul DuBois' Book MySql and Perl For The Web explains CGI.pm much better (you'll still need Stein's book if you're going to be serious about CGI) with examples that really,really, work, extreme attention to detail, and incredible organization.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Still worth reading today, April 24, 2003
The Offical Guide to Programming with CGI is an introductory level text covering Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module. CGI.pm is the standard perl module for working with CGI. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is the standard interface by which external programs can interace with web servers. The text assumes the reader has at least a beginner's knowledge of Perl and HTML. For instance, readers are assumed to know how to use modules, but no prior knowledge of object oriented perl is required. Likewise, the reader should have a passing familiarity with HTML tags, forms in particular. This book is particularly beginner friendly.The reader should be able to walk away from the book with the ability to create simple websites which take and respond to user input. The potential CGI.pm programmer will gain a fundamental knowledge of the module, its interface, and how it may be used to generate HTML. The text also includes a very detailed reference guide which may appeal to those people who prefer to hold what they're reading. While the book was published back in 1998, it hasn't become outdated. It is pleasantly surprising that CGI.pm's interface has changed so little. Support for new standards like XHTML have been added since the book was originally published, but have had little net effect on the use of CGI.pm itself. Why CGI? Isn't that the way people used to write dynamic web pages? Yes. And where portability concerns outweigh performance, it still is. Also, if you're a relative novice or don't have an endless supply of round tuits, CGI programming may present the lowest barrier of entry into dynamic web programming. Even if you later move on to one of the newer templating systems a fundamental knowledge of CGI.pm and how it works will still be useful. Not to mention that some of the templating systems for instance HTML::Mason will run on top of CGI, even though most are primarily designed to work with Apache and mod_perl. For those who would appreciate a short description of what mod_perl is, it basically puts a copy of Perl inside the Apache executable making powerful hooks available to perl scripts and avoiding the overhead of executing a separate process for each CGI script. The author of the book, Lincoln Stein, is also the author of the module itself. In the book, Stein takes the reader through a gradual progression of scenarios and solutions. The explanations are thorough and the pace gradually takes the reader into more advanced topics. In short, it is a concise introduction to CGI programming with Perl. Low level details, like how CGI works under the hood and more advanced topics like security, cascading style sheets, javascript, and persistence are touched upon but not covered in particular depth. The author does however provide many timely references to books and websites where the reader can find more information on those topics.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Tons of CGI Perl books out there? Get this offical one first, February 26, 2001
This book is an excellent concise guide for covering nearly all issues of CGI programming with Perl. Since Perl has been very popular for CGI programming, there are tons of resources out there on the web and lots of books about this topic but you will all start with
use CGI;
Learn it from it's CREATOR and OFFICIAL guide covering topics from multipage applications to extending CGI classes to meet you needs.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
man pages are designed better, December 31, 2001
I've bought this book basically not to burn my eyes reading man pages from the screen. The text itself is good and is exactly what the title tells you - a printed user's manual to (most) popular Perl module.Now I have to ask: how on earth can a book be designed as poorly as that? Whoever the designer is, I'd strongly recommed him(her?) to buy "The Form of the Book" by Jan Tchicold (hope I spelled it correctly).
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent choice for anyone who wants to write Perl/CGI, April 25, 2003
Who better to write a book on the CGI.pm module than the author of the module himself. I must admit that I was afraid that the book wouldn't be intelligible given the fact that many brilliant programmers aren't necessarily gifted writers, but he pulled it off very well!A basic knowledge of Perl is helpful in getting the most out of this book. I would strongly recommend reading at least the first few chapters of "Learning Perl" for people without any other programming skills, or the first few chapters of "Programming Perl" for those coming to Perl from another language. I found that using this book in conjunction with "MySQL and Perl for the Web" gave me a great experience. Even though the latter book sounds like it is aimed more at the DB end, it has a couple good chapters on getting up and running with Perl/CGI and mod_perl. Was also quite thankful that Lincoln covered both the traditional and Object-Oriented interfaces to the module. Great Book!
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Necessary documentation for an excellent (FREE) product., February 24, 2000
I rated this book as 5 stars, not because I can't see how it could be improved, but because the product it documents is so valuable, and the book is necessary to get full value from CGI.pm.While the book's content mostly duplicates information which can be found at the CGI.pm web site, and/or in the CGI.pm source code, it does present it in a much more convenient manner, and seems to contain additional, valuable information. I've used this book for a couple of months now, and wish to refute some of the criticism by other reviewers. The example font is much less bold than the text, but I use reading glasses, and wouldn't even have noticed the lighter font, if it hadn't been pointed out to me in other reviews. Perhaps it doesn't photocopy well? The reference section is a little confusing since it contains some subsections which, in turn, contain alphabetic organization, rather than being strictly alphabetic throughout. The book has a decent index, however, so this isn't a real problem. Besides the organization is beginning to make sense. The book is not quite up-to-date with the product it documents, but publishing a book does have some turn around time after | |
