CGI Programming with Perl: Creating Dynamic Web Pages Second Edition

And yet not. It is an ambiguous blessing that the original CGI persists, adhering to the underside of Web service by the duct tape that is Perl. This point is not missed by Guelich, Gundavaram, and Birznieks, whose advocacy of CGI is both bolstered by the growing applications module base of Perl and tempered by their awareness of CGI's structural limitations. Both new and returning readers of CGI Programming with Perl should browse the last chapter first in order to appreciate the proposed solutions to CGI's greatest sin: its impractical slowness in a world of a million-hits-per-day Web service. The chapter describes CGI-compatible FastCGI and mod_perl technologies that circumvent the process-spawning slowness of the simple CGI. Advanced users might want to skip directly to O'Reilly's fine mod_perl tome, Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C, by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern.

The authors' second pass at CGI pedagogy is a lucid, honest, and expanded account that develops functionality of dynamic Web pages in a rational progression--from HTML client-server and CGI syntax basics to general input/output, forms, e-mail, graphics, and simple database applications, including maintaining client state and data persistence under the otherwise stateless HTTP protocol. The authors offer synopses of cookies, JavaScripting, server security, and XML, all of which are described in detail in other books.

Whether or not neoclassical CGI is fast enough for your purposes--perhaps for guarded intranets--bear in mind that CGI is the standard to which every other Web server has had to respond. The second edition of CGI Programming with Perl is still the best introduction to the classics. --Peter Leopold

Scott Guelich graduated from Oberlin College in 1993 with a philosophy degree and decided to "only take a few years off" before continuing with graduate school. Unable to find any listing for "Philosopher Wanted" in the classifieds, and having done some programming while growing up, he quickly found himself working with computers. He discovered the Internet the following year and Perl the year after that. Scott has been a web developer for the past few years and currently contracts in the San Francisco Bay Area. He enjoys taijiquan, mountain biking, wind surfing, skiing, and anything that gets him outside and closer to nature. Despite the hours he spends working online, Scott is actually a closet Luddite who doesn't own a television, hasn't bought a cell phone, and still intends to make it to graduate school . . . some day.

Shishir Gundavaram graduated from Boston University with a BS in Biomedical Engineering in May of 1995. For his undergraduate thesis, he developed a Windows application for the Motor Unit Lab of the NeuroMuscular Research Center that allowed researchers to acquire and analyze muscle force output from patients to indirectly observe the electrical activity of muscles. He was the sole author of CGI Programming on the World Wide Web, published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., in 1996.

Gunther Birznieks is currently the chief technology officer for eXtropia.com, best known for its open source web programming archives and online tutorials in a variety of subjects related to web programming (Perl, CGI, Java). Before this, Gunther did web programming and infrastructure for the Human Genome Project. Most recently, he was an associate director at Barclays Capital where he had been the global head of web engineering.