Excellent review, you made some very good points. I bought Castro's html vqg a while back and thought it was an excellent book (and I still recommend it) so when I wanted to learn perl (and cgi in particular) it seemed like a good idea to buy this book. I read the whole thing through and thought it was a pretty good book, that is until I actually learned a thing or two about perl, and in particular, security. On the bright side though, the book did do a decent job fueling my fireplace :-)