Rating: 
Summary: Superb book!
Review: A great book that teaches you why not how. This book doesn't teach you Perl, it assumes you know Perl - instead it teaches you all the tricks with using Perl on the web. Useful both as an introductory guide and as a quick-reference manual.
Rating:
Summary: O'Reilly does it again
Review: Another great book in the O'Reilly computer book series. Great in depth reviews of all concepts, and enough source code to get even a beginner started. A definite pick.
Rating:
Summary: This is the Bible for CGI programming in Perl
Review: Anyone who wants to know about CGI programming should buy this book. Even beginning programmers can learn from this book. A must have.
Rating: 
Summary: Pick a better book
Review: As I'm not an experienced programmer, I did find this book very difficult to understand. The authors assume you have an in-depth knowledge of PERL and the workings of CGI.The book does offer some good knowledge in real-life examples for Webmasters. It discusses forms and how the information is passed with certain HTML commands. However, if you want to learn about CGI, choose another. As for Perl, I've found Larry Wall's books very good.
Rating: 
Summary: Better Off with Perl/Apache Man Pages
Review: CGI Programming with Perl is a weak title from Oreilly. 500 pages is alot of paper for the amount of info you get. Overall, if you not looking for detail, but rather a broad intro into CGI programming this is a good bet. If you're looking for details, there not here. Check out cpan or apache sites.
Rating: 
Summary: Good reference
Review: Good reference material on cgi.pm, security, etc.
Rating:
Summary: Dont know Perl dont buy this book
Review: I bought this book because i wanted to proccess Credit Cards on my website through CGI Scripting but when i got it i was dissapointed because it requires you to know Perl Language.
It kind of helped me a little but if u are interested in CGI Programming and dont know Pearl do not buy this book but if you do i think it will help you.
Rating:
Summary: Challenging but worth reading carefully
Review: I found this book to be difficult to read because it covers so many topics in a concise manner. I also found this book uniquely useful because it covers so many topics in a concise manner. I am in the process of designing and implementing a web site that needs CGI programming. I had never done CGI programming before and didn't know what CGI packages and approaches I wanted to use. This book was useful to me because it surveyed a wide variety of topics and approaches, briefly but in enough depth to be useful for professional website programming. Basically, every Section in every Chapter addresses a major new topic in depth, covering a surprising amount of ground for such a small book. By skimming each Section, I was able to quickly orient myself and determine if the topic was applicable to my website. If not, I didn't waste any more time on it. If so, I read the section very carefully. Because each topic only gets a few pages (even though many of them could easily have an entire book devoted to them), the writing is very dense and makes strong demands on the reader. This book is not suitable for the reader who wants a lot of hand-holding. Still, enough material is there that I rarely needed to consult outside documentation. For example, the chapter on HTML templates covers a wide variety of approaches for embedding CGI output in HTML, carefully listing the strengths and weaknesses of each in both text and a summary chart. I had had initially thought that I would be able to use CGI.pm and Server-Side Includes to implement part of my site. The book's concise discussion of the limitations of SSI quickly made it clear I needed something more powerful. Reading further in the chapter, I found that the HTML::Template package had everything I needed. In only 8 pages on HTML::Template, I was able to master the package without reading any outside documentation. However, the section on HTML::Template was very densely written so that I had to read it very carefully.
Rating:
Summary: Very balanced and complete!
Review: I grabbed this book after reading a review on slashdot.org that rated it a 9 out of 10. When I saw some of the reviews here I had second thoughts, but fortunately I trusted slashdot. Someone here complained that the book talks about using modules, like CGI.pm. It does - there's a whole chapter devoted to CGI.pm, but the following chapter talks about another way to write CGIs: HTML templates (like Embperl, Mason, HTML::Template, etc.). This is an example of how balanced the book is. In both chapters the authors explain that different programmers have different preferences. Instead of only presenting one way of creating HTML output (or ignoring CPAN entirely like other CGI books), they present all the popular options. That lets you choose what works best for you (hey, Perl's slogan is TIMTOWTDI... there is more than one way to do it). Also, now I thorougly know how CGI.pm and Embperl work, and even though I might not use them for the scripts I write from scratch, it helps if I find myself working on a project that does use them (and lots do). This book doesn't just teach you CGI one way, like most other CGI books, and it doesn't promote certain technologies. Instead, it's very complete and the authors clearly show they have lots of experience with CGI.
Rating:
Summary: A good place to start
Review: I purchased "CGI Programming with Perl" thinking it was, like many O'Reilly books, a bible of programming how-to for the working programmer. It's not. What it is, in fact, is a pretty good introduction to writing CGIs with Perl for someone who has some basic knowledge of Perl and HTTP, but who has never done any CGI programming. And that's just the position I was in when I bought it. The first third of the book is introductory in nature, with an introduction to how forms and CGI scripts work, some discussion of parsing forms in other languages, and some simple examples. The bulk of the book contains more complex examples of tasks like writing questionaires, interfacing with relational databases, maintaining state, graphics and so forth. I did glean a lot of useful information there. The biggest problem with this book is a problem that's really common to all book on Internet programming: Standards are changing so fast that a year old book is likely to contain chapter upon chapter illustrating obsolete techniques and libraries. In "CGI Programming" there are a lot of examples using Perl modules that haven't really caught on, while some of the newer modules (obviously) aren't meantioned. Another problem is that the book is kind of scattershot in the attention it gives different topics. Still, I think this is one of the better books for someone with basic Perl skills looking to get started with CGIs. There's enough detail here to start writing CGIs, and enough information out there on the web to go on learning.
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