Great post. I've linked to here from New Monks Info Page as the first link.

To help newbies out as much as possible I think a little spoon feeding is the order of the day so adding inline links every time you mention a potentially (for a newbie) jargon term might help make this node even more useful than it already is.

I love your description of Tom's idiots CGI guide prose. As per our /msg discussion here are some links I think might add value. If you just inline them into the existing text if someone does not know what a term means the answer will be there. I've escaped them so you can just cut and paste them from here:

Warnings

[use warnings vs. perl -w|"-w" or "use warnings;"] turns on all sorts of warnings about probable errors.

Diagnostics

[perlman:lib:diagnostics|use diagnostics;]   # optional; causes warnings to be explained in greater detail.

Strict

[perlman:lib:strict|"use strict"] generates compile and run-time errors for certain unsafe variable, reference and subroutine constructs.

CPAN

<a href="http://www.perl.com/CPAN/">Comprehensive Perl Archive Network</a>

Modules

For module installation problems [A detailed How-To for locally installing modules|a detailed How-To for locally installing modules] and [Installing modules on Win32|installing modules on Win32] may be helpful.

CGI.pm

for reasons why you should be using CGI.pm see [use CGI or die;|use CGI or die] and [No excuses about not using CGI.pm|no excuses for not using CGI.pm].

<code> tags

<a href="http://www.perlmonks.com/index.pl?node=Site%20How%20To&lastnode_id=83010#code"><code></a>

tachyon

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.