As a generic review, this one strikes me as a bit odd becuase the basis seems to be made on a single purpose: to learn more about CGI module uses.

I agree it is a waste of time and money for the purpose you bought it for. Our intention was not to compete with KM book or the Rat book (which I am a coauthor of) and both of which you recommend for that purpose, but rather to extend something like the Rat book to include scripts that could basically just be configured and used right away -- hence the word "instant".

I would venture to guess that you probably bought the book on-line as opposed to being able to look at the book over briefly in the bookstore. As you probably would have seen the intent more clearly soon after flipping a few pages. As it was, I suspect because you bought it for a different purpose, you were disappointed quite quickly. :(

So if there is an on-line writeup that you feel is not representative of what the book is supposed to express, then please let us know.

This book is primarily for those people who are more interested in "instant" CGI scripts in the sense of having a toolkit and sample code that can be extended for us in CGI as well as mod_perl and other environments including drivers for hooking the auth model for the apps into LDAP, SMB, etc. I don't know if it would interest users as experienced as PerlMonks are except that the latter half of the book (the Modules portion) may be considered interesting example of OO programming design for web including discussions of design patterns used in web programming, and concepts of why things were split out the way they were. Some may agree and some may disagree, but it's currently the most verbose writeup of an open source CGI/Perl development toolkit that exists right now.

And of course, we're always looking to improve the toolkit. The most recent release has bits that are not covered in the book such as incorporation of Template-Toolkit (http://www.template-toolkit.org). And a more sophisticated Action Handler mechanism. We are participating in the Perl Widgets library in Source Forge as one of the next steps we feel will be interesting for the toolkit.

So in summary, the book really serves two purposes:

1) Provide an introduction to installing open source/freeware scripts.

This is the primary purpose of the "instant" part including explanation of some of our more popular scripts.

2) The 2nd part being an explanation of how we designed the toolkit.

This is more intended for advanced users who may have their own toolkits or interested in participating in another one or just getting some ideas.

The toolkit concept has been also borne out in the Java community which has produced a similar one called Struts which follows some of our design principles, and likewise ours follows some of theirs (eg action handlers).

Thanks,
Gunther