Comments on: Writing CGI Applications with Perl

By: Roger

Roger — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:17:50 +0000

I'm not sure how they did it, but this book is incredible. It's not often that you find a book that can be used by a beginner and contains such intermediate/advance material. After a few chapters, I was able to finish applications that I had sitting around for months. The practical code and step-by-step explanations are great. The main text and code explanations employ the same concise, easy to understand teaching method. I am very impressed with the speed with which I was able to grasp and implement many new cgi concepts. Especially useful was the sections on using cookies, and the DBI interface. I already have 2 applications using MySQL and Oracle as a result of this book. Some projects that we were planning to implement using java and an expensive proprietary java web server and now being done in cgi, thanks to the sections on cgi.pm, mod_perl and Apache::Registry. Finally, I had plan to use a companion Orielly perl book to bring me up to speed on my perl, but there was little need since the authors did such an excellent job with explaining the perl concepts, code and cgi.
Rating: 5 / 5

By: Thomas Stanley

Thomas Stanley — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:23:25 +0000

I needed a book to both learn the details of using the CGI Perl module, and also as a reference guide. This book does both admirably. Kevin and Brent cover a lot of material and back it up with real world examples of how to do it, as well as providing a detailed explanation of why and how it works.
Rating: 5 / 5

By: Beth Temple

Beth Temple — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:33:37 +0000

I bought this book because the Amazon reviewers loved it so much. I got about 150 pages into it and now I need to buy a different book. This book is good for people who really really like to learn by rote. The authors cover interesting and important topics, but they don't explain them well. They don't even try to outline the purpose of a script before coding it. They also introduce functions that are new to the reader somewhere in the middle of a script. They never write, "This is function x. It can be used like this… Here is an example…."

They just start coding without any introduction except for some stupid jokes.

That said, if you already know a buttload of Perl and DBI and CGI programming, you might like this book for the examples.

Also, there were way too many errors in the text and the code, and that makes it even harder to learn.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: J. Dacquisto

J. Dacquisto — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:20:29 +0000

This was a little conplex and not easy to follow, as some reviews said.

I'd look at another.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: Blake Thornton

Blake Thornton — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:54:15 +0000

I read the raving previous reviews and thought this would be the CGI book for me. It wasn't. I know a bit of perl, but relatively little about cgi (I know a bit, but not much). Here are my comments:

Good things:
- I thought most of the example programs in the text were good and illustrated the points being made.
- I liked the discussion on taint

Bad points:
- I thought the examples were somewhat random and did not give me tools to attack general problems.
- I would have liked a better description of cgi.pm (perhaps I should get Lincoln Stein's book)
- I did not like the line by line format of the code. I found this very distracting and redundant. I would have preferred seeing the code and then having the authors describe the main points of the code (instead of all the trivial comments inbetween all the lines).
- I did not like the dependence on databases. Perhaps this is something most serious cgi programmers use, but storing my data in text files is sufficient for most of the applications I might use. I would have preferred a separate chapter on database and cgi (or I could just buy a separate book on this).

I'm not sure why everyone else raved about the book so much, but I didn't find it so wonderful. Rating: 2 / 5