Rating: 
Summary: Took me one day to write exactly the script I wanted
Review: (I have the spanish version of this book.) I needed a script to register client's data. This book took me from just a vague knowledge of perl --which I got from useful webpages-- to writing a script with cookies to recoginse returning users, logging to record usage of my site and security tips to reasonably understand vulnerability and do something about it. I highly recommend it for newbies (such as myself).
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After Purchasing Elizabeth Castro's HTML book I figured her PERL book would be a sure thing. It is marketed as a 'first programming book, and is tailored at perl for the web---A great concept. "For the essence of space" she has left out details, writes Castro. Unfortunately, I am discovering that I am unable to make the leap of faith she assumes to produce results. I think the book has value for learning how to set-up scripts, but you had better look for a second book as a strong reference on the actual perl.If her book had full-blown examples of the concepts reduced for space in the book, I think the book would be more complete. I hope the 2nd revision made marketed improvements. It was unavailable on the prjected release date in the Netherlands.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Learners Guide
Review: Although I am computer knowledgeable and have several certifications, I knew absolutely nothing about Perl and CGI before reading this text. I looked at several other texts that were larger but seemed to contain a lot more fluff instead of actually useful information. This book was excellent for learning Perl and CGI starting from complete ground zero.
Within hours I was creating and testing scripts and actually wrote one to do what I needed done. I also downloaded another script that would not work and was able to troubleshoot and fix it to do what I needed. An excellent book that walks you through the steps one item at a time it was easy to understand and work through.
One of the things that this book contained that I did not see in other books was instructions on how to download, install and setup a personal server so that you can test the scripts you write as you learn. This information alone makes this book superior to most others. There is no better learning environment than being able to actually write and test the scripts.
Some HTML knowledge is assumed, however it is very little. Picking up a basic HTML book allows you to quickly come up to speed with the knowledge assumed. On the other hand, the required HTML knowledge is easily obtained from various sites on the Internet.
I could not recommend this book highly enough for anyone who needs to learn Perl and CGI basics and needs to get up to speed as soon as possible.
Rating: 
Summary: Great place to start and a decent reference besides
Review: Castro has written several books in the Visual Quick Start series including her best-selling HTML book and more recently her book on XML. I've been using the HTML and Perl/CGI books since 2001 on various projects and have found them extremely useful. I have a few other books in the VQS series and I can tell you that they are not all created equal. Castro, however, is pretty thorough which is why this book is not only a good starting place, but a usable reference as well. Some topics covered include getting familiar with Perl syntax and functions, installing Perl, communicating with Web servers, creating HTML pages and forms, serving up data, and dealing with security. If you know any programming language, you can begin to pick up Perl very quickly from her examples. In fact I used this book to tackle my first Perl script and had it working fairly quickly. She assumes some knowledge of HTML and the basics of Web servers and browsers. Advanced topics such as using databases to store or retrieve data on Web pages is not covered in this fairly small book, but that is a topic worthy of a separate book anyway. Other issues such as dealing with specific Web servers are also best left to other books. For the price and ease of use, I highly recommend Castro's book. You'll be seeing the results of your first CGI script in no time at all.
Rating:
Summary: Awsome for newbies
Review: Firstly you should have some programming background to get the most out of this book - Unix platform being the most helpful. This book leaves no guesswork for the reader and provides everything you need to know in using CGI today! The best part of Elizabeth's books is that she provides a website for Q&A, updates, and revisions as supplemental material. She is truely one of the few authors who takes care and effort in trying to maximize a reader's understanding of the material. Yes this is a newbie book, nothing is glossed over or left to the imagination. I'm actually a fan of the 1st edition of this book and would recommend it instead. However, the 2nd edition is the result of suggestions and input from readers of the 1st edition as well as providing information on how to set up a desktop web-server to test your scripts. If your test platform is Linux then everything you'll need comes standard. If it's Windows then you'll have some choices to make and install (don't worry it's all free). If using Mac OS10.x then your test platform is ready to go with little effort!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent beginner book for Perl CGI
Review: Great beginner book for learning how to build Perl CGI scripts for your websites. It does assume that you already understand basic programming concepts and know HTML. This book explains how to: process data entered through HTML forms; work with strings, arrays, conditional statements, and subroutines; work with cookies; and write to external files. I would've liked to have seen a little more about matching and parsing in the 'Analyzing Data' section and also about what makes a Perl CGI script different from a regular Perl script (in other words, just a little bit more about CGI)--but it's still an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Not for programmers....
Review: I bought this book as a reference to learn how to start programming in Perl & CGI - but have just found this book ill written and simply hard to follow. Other books in this set, such as PHP and MySQL, are wonderful resources - but this one just isn't. Not to mention I still havn't found the downloadable scripts that the book advertises. I am going to pitch this book when I get a better reference.
Rating:
Summary: A good beginner book but you will need to know HTML
Review: I bought this book to put CGI on my own website. When you send your data on the examples in this book they go to the authors CGI pages at a web site (www.cookbook.com)But you can use these examples on your own server and I have IIS version 5.1.
The purpose of me trying to learn CGI was to make CGI scripts to have my own web page have my own Guestbook,ect,ect..
This book really does help in learning perl. If you have IIS server on your computer there is a web site you can go to just type in "IIS Server .pl and .cgi on IIS Server" in Google search engine and you should find a web page to help you; and you should be able to get your IIS server running .cgi scripts from out of this book. A great book for beginners!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Not my style
Review: I found both the layout and the text of this book difficult to learn from. With its small visual chunks, my eyes had to jump around the page excessively in order to take in the information presented. The font size and colors didn't help readability. Also, it seemed like important points were glossed over while trivial details were belabored. For example, I couldn't find explanations of some of the perl syntax used in examples, yet anchor tags were explained step by step, where the first step was to 'type an opening angle bracket <', then 'type a href= ' ...and so on. This just seemed absurd to me, but I guess some readers aren't bothered by the uneven levels of coverage. I have since switched to "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz and "CGI 101" by Jacqueline Hamilton, and am much happier with these books.
Rating:
Summary: 2nd edition: Flawed masterpiece
Review: I taught myself CGI programming with the first edition of this book a couple of years ago, and have spent most of the ensuing time as a professional web programmer. This alone is testament to the effectiveness of Castro's teaching/writing ability. The second edition does add much that was missing from the first edition, such as the "use strict" pragma that forces programmers to declare variables, and the CGI.pm library that, for one, circumvents the tedium of parsing form data. Arguably the most important edition, however, is the discussion of setting up a local test environment, but it is also in this area that the book falls short. In particular I find it bothersome that the author does not recommend installing Apache as a test environment. After all, Apache is the environment under which most CGI scripts will eventually run on virtual web hosts running the Linux/Unix operating system. So by testing with Apache for Windows, you will be emulating the actual production environment of the script much more closely than by using the other web servers that are recommended. In fact, there are a number of (free) products on the market that bundle Apache and Perl together, so that you don't have to go through the extra step of downloading and installing Perl seperately from the web server software, as in the book's examples. Another sin of omission is that no consideration is given to the persistent storage of data, other than cumbersome text files. However, this has been one of the areas in which the greatest strides have been made since the first edition. Retrieval and storage of data from web applications, using some sort of database, are practically a given today. Perhaps the author thought that a discussion of the Perl DBI (Database Interface) would be too much of a digression, and would involve setting up additional database software. However, a few of the same bundles I mentioned above not only include Apache and Perl, but also the mySQL database engine. At the very least I think there should have been discussion of the very simple "DBM" database system available on almost all Unix systems. Perl makes it very easy to store hash arrays to disk in this format, and just as easy to import them into hashes. This would at least provide readers with a stepping stone to eventually investigating the more robust DBI library. So I rate the content a 5, but I take off one point for what the book lacks.
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