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.
Rating: 
Summary: I found this book good enough to get a copy
Review: I read the reviews after I read the book.. I find the book good enough to own a copy of it after I read it at the Univ Library. I know Perl and am familiar with CGI - this books gives a really good feel of the concept short of reading the man pages..Good coverage on CGI and the realted perl modules Has sufficient background to help/give persepective (and not spoonfeed). Good book
Rating:
Summary: Complete and well written
Review: I thought this was a very complete, well written description of CGI programming. It's informative reading and also makes a great reference. There've been lots of CGI programming by example books out there that try to show you a few examples and go from there. As this book claims, its approach is to teach you to understand how things work and use examples to support this instead of the other way around. It's complete, and the topics it covers even extend beyond CGI programming to other forms of web programming (especially mod_perl but even Java too). This book doesn't try to teach you Perl, but I've not seen a good book that succeeds in teaching both together. Perl isn't just for CGI programming and there's a lot to it. If you need an intro to Perl, buy "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz (also by O'Reilly)... it's not too long and very well written, and after reading that then you'll be ready to learn to apply Perl to CGI. I looked at the errata and there were some errors in the initial printing, but they're fixed in my copy so I can hold that against them.
Rating: 
Summary: Collaboration from your bookshelf
Review: I'm a avid reader of O'Reily Publications. The majority of their books provide a thorough and complete explanation and examples of how to and why you are doing something. This book gave a very general touch of the major aspects of the Common Gateway Interface. However, the book assumes that you have a solid understanding of Perl and suggests that you look at other books for deeper understanding of the programming concepts. A newbie at Perl will find themselves making constant trips to his bookshelf to look something up to make sense out of what the book is saying. So all in all the title is a bit missleading as this book is really more about concepts in CGI mixed with some simple examples, but fails on really covering the "programming" part of it.
Rating:
Summary: This is "THE" CGI book
Review: I've done many perl/CGI scripts. I've tried to find a really solid book on teaching me how to write a good perl/CGI script. But most of the book only teach you how to program CGI without teaching you why. This is it! The title is damn right. This is a book about CGI programming. Perl is the major language used in this book but not the main purpose of this book. You will learn a solid background about HTTP and CGI. You might need another Perl book to learn how to program perl, but you definetly will know how CGI works in this book. Thank you, o'reilly!
Rating:
Summary: After the errata, then what . . .
Review: I've got the July 2000 printing and was amazed at the errata and the errata items yet to be "confirmed"! As an example of the latter, just beyond half-way through the book there's an address book cgi script some 10 pages in length of which only the first page or so is explained. The script is an attempt to use the Perl DBI along with the DBD::CSV modules (utilizing SQL statements) to explain the database role in "Data Persistance"! The problem is that the "getQueryResults" subroutine in the script doesn't return any records when searching for particular field values (and returns every record in the database if no values are entered in the "search" form). In addition the "doUpdate" module reports that an update has been completed when in reality there has been no change to the database! If you're planning on using the book to learn some CGI with Perl, then you're going to be set back by this and other code malfunctions scattered throughout the book! Even though it's a step up from the CGI Primer Plus for Windows book (and gets a 4 star rating), it still leaves much to be desired for the person who learns by coding!
Rating:
Summary: After the errata, then what . . .
Review: I've got the July 2000 printing and was amazed at the errata and the errata items yet to be "confirmed"! As an example of the latter, just beyond half-way through the book there's an address book cgi script some 10 pages in length of which only the first page or so is explained. The script is an attempt to use the Perl DBI along with the DBD::CSV modules (utilizing SQL statements) to explain the database role in "Data Persistance"! The problem is that the "getQueryResults" subroutine in the script doesn't return any records when searching for particular field values (and returns every record in the database if no values are entered in the "search" form). In addition the "doUpdate" module reports that an update has been completed when in reality there has been no change to the database! If you're planning on using the book to learn some CGI with Perl, then you're going to be set back by this and other code malfunctions scattered throughout the book! Even though it's a step up from the CGI Primer Plus for Windows book (and gets a 4 star rating), it still leaves much to be desired for the person who learns by coding!
Rating:
Summary: After the errata, then what . . .
Review: I've got the July 2000 printing and was amazed at the errata and the errata items yet to be "confirmed"! As an example of the latter, just beyond half-way through the book there's an address book cgi script some 10 pages in length of which only the first page or so is explained. The script is an attempt to use the Perl DBI along with the DBD::CSV modules (utilizing SQL statements) to explain the database role in "Data Persistance"! The problem is that the "getQueryResults" subroutine in the script doesn't return any records when searching for particular field values (and returns every record in the database if no values are entered in the "search" form). In addition the "doUpdate" module reports that an update has been completed when in reality there has been no change to the database! If you're planning on using the book to learn some CGI with Perl, then you're going to be set back by this and other code malfunctions scattered throughout the book! Even though it's a step up from the CGI Primer Plus for Windows book (and gets a 4 star rating), it still leaves much to be desired for the person who learns by coding!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy it!
Review: One of the worst books I have ever tried to read. Brought it back for refund. Badly organized. Hard to understand. Those guys probably paid for their own book to be published.
Rating:
Summary: Should be called "Using perl modules for CGI"
Review: Sad to say this book is far from on par with O'Reilly's usually high standards. It's more of a nutshell book, touching upon this and that and not explaining the underlying necessary knowledge one must know to write cgi's. My biggest complaint actually is that the authors spend most of the book talking about how to do things with the perl modules such as Carp and CGI.pm, so much so that they don't bother to tell you how to actually write the cgi's yourself without depending on these additional and usually unnecessary modules. I for one don't see how print $q->header( "text/html" ); is an improvement considering how perl is so natural language without all this garbage, and would like to learn how to program perl cgi prior to learning modules.
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