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Order PERL and CGI For the World Wide Web

Item Description: A beginners guide to Perl.

Review Synopsis: Beginner's Perl




Well when I first picked up this book, I had no clue what Perl or CGI was or internet programming in general even was. I was very uneducated in this area of computing and programming as you can see. However, when I started to read through the first few chapters of it (the book,) I started to get a grasp on what Perl did and can do for you on a web server. As I read on in the book, I continued to pick up many basic control structure loops, and so on, picking up the syntax like an easily understood entity.

As most of you seasoned Perl veterens out there know, this is simply another beginners guide to starting out in the world of Perl/CGI scripting. It even specifies that it's a beginner to intermediate's book. However, it is really an informative and helpful book for it's money for anyone who is new or a beginner to Perl as a whole. It breaks down big concepts into bite-size pieces and is easily understood from cover to cover.

The only drawback to this book is it's not really the type of book someone in the true Perl collective would want to read or even be associated with. It is definently not for the Perl eleet due to it being close to what MSA's information or Selena Sol's stuff is, and they are really not in the real perl eleet. (Far from it.)

In conclusion, if you are interested in starting out in the world of Perl, but don't know where to really start, go out and buy this book, because it's a great first book to learn Perl in, and will help you become very basically knowledgeable in this subject we know as Perl.


Thank you if you have read this at least to the end! :-)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: PERL and CGI For the World Wide Web
by davorg (Chancellor) on Feb 20, 2001 at 13:56 UTC

    There's already a review of this book here and it's a good deal less complimentary than yours. Here are some bullet points:

    • No use strict or -w
    • No use of CGI.pm
    • Cursory discussion of security relegated to an appendix

    It is the best of the 'non-programmer' Perl/CGI books that I've seen - but that really isn't saying very much :(

    --
    <http://www.dave.org.uk>

    "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
    and the boring jobs bearable" - me

      I bought the second edition of this book because I knew a little about Perl but nothing about CGI programming for the Web. I found it excellent, and liked the way it recommended and explained how to install a local Windows server on which to test scripts. Yeah, I already knew html, but lots of people don't and it is a beginners book.

      The second edition appears to address the issues in ovid's review; CGI.pm, -wT etc. A whole chapter (admittedly not many pages, but it's a start) is devoted to security, and also points the reader to suitable sources for security information.

      Sure, there are faults in the book, but the point is that it's an easy read and gets the job done - not perfectly, but it can be improved later. It's a Quick Start - it doesn't claim to be the definitive teach yourself Perl or Web Techniques.

      In response to the previous responses, yes, this book has already been reviewed here at perlmonks.org, BUT I figured that there needed to be a shorter review so that the general public could read it faster and understand what this book was about. It contains more of useless homebrewed parsing and so on and as stated by davorg it doesn't use CGI.pm or -w etc. Thank you for your comments though. --bladx
Re: PERL and CGI For the World Wide Web
by AgentM (Curate) on Feb 20, 2001 at 11:14 UTC
    Question4U: Does this book cover CGI.pm or does it use a home-cooked brew? So many BAD books out there cook up their own POST parser and what not and end up teaching the beginner (of all people, AT LEAST the beginner should be taught correctly) to cut-n-paste code with blatant security holes. Of all the CGI books I've flipped through at my local B&N, only O'Reilly's CGI book managed to come through. If this book does not cover the aforementioned module, it should be fair to warn other beginners to not waste their time and money on it. </rantmode>
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