You're setting up a SELECT SQL statement selecting date, title and entry fields from a table called News. This is what prepare does. In the next statement this gets executed, i.e. the query is actually submitted to the database. The while loops over the rows fetched from the database and prints them out.

Of course, your database should have a table News with fields date, title and entry to start with.

First you should check what tables have been defined, if any. This can be done using the mysql client that comes with mysql, or even by just peeking into the file system (if memory serves). There's also an SQL query to do this, but I don't remember it of hand.

Hope this helps, -gjb-

Update: You really don't want qw since this evaluates to a list of words while prepare is expecting just a single string. Use q or qq instead.

rdfield

For the syntax error, see my update reply above.

I'd not say that prepare stores an address. The following is taken from the DBI module docs

.

The DBI allows an application to ``prepare'' statements for later execution. A prepared statement is identified by a statement handle held in a Perl variable. We'll call the Perl variable $sth in our examples.

The typical method call sequence for a SELECT statement is:

  prepare,
    execute, fetch, fetch, ...
    execute, fetch, fetch, ...
    execute, fetch, fetch, ...

for example:

  $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT foo, bar FROM table WHERE baz=?");
  $sth->execute( $baz );
  while ( @row = $sth->fetchrow_array ) {
    print "@row\n";
  }
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The typical method call sequence for a non-SELECT statement is:

  prepare,
    execute,
    execute,
    execute.

for example:

  $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO table(foo,bar,baz) VALUES (?,?,?)"
+);
  while(<CSV>) {
    chop;
    my ($foo,$bar,$baz) = split /,/;
        $sth->execute( $foo, $bar, $baz );
  }
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You can view prepare as a kind of compilation step. (The INSERT query puts something into the table.

Hope this helps, -gjb-