Rating: 
Summary: Excellent intermediate level Perl CGI book
Review: At last, a Perl CGI book that doesn't spend the first two chapters showing you how to install Active Perl on Windows 98!This book is for those who have already started working with Perl CGI and want to know more. If you have ever downloaded and installed scripts from Matt's Script Archive or CGI-Resources.com or if you have installed Perl on your Windoze box and played with it and want to learn more, this book is for you. Unlike many Perl CGI books that end with a chapter on how to use modules from CPAN, this book with starts with how to install and use modules and then shows you how to use the more advanced Perl CGI features like CGI.pm, mod_perl and Mason. It takes you through projects like using the Perl DBI, file uploading, cookies, working with the Apache registry and XML. As an earlier reviewer pointed out, this is a unique Perl book and has its own niche. If falls in between a beginner book like Jacqueline Hamilton's CGI Programming 101, Simon Cozen's Beginning Perl or Randall Schwartz's Learning Perl and the more advanced books like O'Reilly's Programming Perl and Advanced Perl Programming. It's also nice to see a new Perl CGI book come out a time when CGI seems to be losing ground to the newer web development technologies like PHP, Java Server Pages and ASP.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a good introduction to CGI
Review: 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:
Summary: Very helpful
Review: I just started using this book and it is friggin' amazing. I've been a fan of Perl for years although I've also programmed in VB, C, Java, etc. But Perl has always been the "useful glue" for everything. Most of my web dev has been Java and just starting to tap Perl as a CGI solution. This book has educated me more in ONE HOUR than I even imagined. It expects that you have used Perl a bit, but not much. It really reveals the power of Perl as a CGI/server-side solution. I always think books this well done are worth buying since you'll just get smarter and make more money - a no brainer.... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: Just an awsome book - chock full of useful web code
Review: I just started using this book and it is friggin' amazing. I've been a fan of Perl for years although I've also programmed in VB, C, Java, etc. But Perl has always been the "useful glue" for everything. Most of my web dev has been Java and just starting to tap Perl as a CGI solution. This book has educated me more in ONE HOUR than I even imagined. It expects that you have used Perl a bit, but not much. It really reveals the power of Perl as a CGI/server-side solution. I always think books this well done are worth buying since you'll just get smarter and make more money - a no brainer.... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: Just an awsome book - chock full of useful web code
Review: I just started using this book and it is friggin' amazing. I've been a fan of Perl for years although I've also programmed in VB, C, Java, etc. But Perl has always been the "useful glue" for everything. Most of my web dev has been Java and just starting to tap Perl as a CGI solution. This book has educated me more in ONE HOUR than I even imagined. It expects that you have used Perl a bit, but not much. It really reveals the power of Perl as a CGI/server-side solution. I always think books this well done are worth buying since you'll just get smarter and make more money - a no brainer.... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating:
Summary: A Must-Have book for writing CGI applications
Review: 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:
Summary: A Must-Have book for writing CGI applications
Review: 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:
Summary: This is a good book
Review: I purchased this book about a week ago and I must say I am impressed. Finally, a CGI reference that serious Perl programmers can use. Pick this up, along with Lincoln Stein's "Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm, and you will be well on your way to Perl/CGI Nirvana. I was disapointed to see the negative review posted about this book. This is not a book that teaches Perl. Rather, it teaches the user how to use Perl to develop CGI apps. I think THAT reviewer would be better off with the excellent "Learning Perl" from O'Reilly. The level of Perl knowledge needed to understand this book is not very high, however. A moderately experienced developer will breeze through the examples. Good luck!
Rating:
Summary: Not all I expected
Review: 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:
Summary: Not all I expected
Review: 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.
| 
