Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours

Rating:
Summary: Great Start for a Perl Beginning
Review: Dear Mr. Rafe Colburn:
Buddy! Just thought I had better write you to THANK you for your book, 'Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours". I bought the book last Christmas, and though progress is slow, things are sinking in GOOD!
I just wrapped my head around Hour 15, Session (State) Management, and cookies. Your book is extremely well laid out, easy to understand, and there hasn't been an exercise in your book that I haven't been able to complete yet! The exercises are challenging and fun yet possible with your book. Once again, THANK YOU SO MUCH!
I have found it to be an OUTSTANDING resource for myself, a beginner in the PERL programming language.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent beginners book!
Review: I have been learning CGI/PERL/PHP for the past 6 months now. I am currently in an internship and my job is to update the webpage. This book was great! This book helped me a lot. I am definitely still a begginner at CGI and this book taught me a lot of basics. You won't learn how to create professional looking guestbooks or message boards but you will learn the basics of how to create them. This book covers just about everything you need to know to get started.

Rating:
Summary: An introduction to building Web applications
Review: I wrote _Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours_ not so much as a tutorial for writing programs that utilize CGI but rather as an introduction to the design and construction of Web applications. The examples in the book are CGI programs, and can be modified to use on any Web site, but at the same time, they illustrate the principles common to Web applications regardless of the tools used to create them.

I firmly believe that Web applications will continue to displace client-server applications and desktop applications in the future, and that CGI is a good starting point for anyone who wants to build Web applications. This book was written not only to allow programmers to quickly get up to speed on building Web applications, but also to enable non-programmers to understand CGI and to be able to build Web applications as they learn to program.

Users who are already familiar with the Perl programming language will have the easiest time working through the book, but someone who understands the basics of computer programming shouldn't have much trouble understanding the book or applying the examples in it. The book does not explain basic programming concepts, so if the reader hasn't done any computer programming before, they would benefit greatly by learning something about computer programming as they go along from another reference, or looking into programming before they read the book.

Rating:
Summary: I am impressed
Review: The content of the book impressed me. Prior to reading the book, I had taught myself Perl programming, and had learned the basics of forms processing. I didn't understand some of CGI jargon I came across in more than one Perl book that glossed over CGI in a single chapter somewhere toward the back of the book. But this book on CGI programming gave me all the information I needed to feel like a CGI pro, someone who could keep his cool in any discussion where "CGI" was spoken.

Some of the information in this book is worth writing down, so you can remember the clear understanding that reading the book gave you, and so you can regurgitate that understanding to other people later, say after months of no complex CGI programming. This book offers enough explanation to make you see things from a webmaster's perspective, but also a UNIX programmer's perspective. Without more than a basic idea of how the UNIX command-line works.

I will confess that if you don't know Perl, I don't think you'd have the same reaction I did. But CGI books shouldn't have to teach you Perl, and at the same time, Perl is THE language for CGI programming. The "brief" coverage that this book gives to other CGI languages is not meant to underplay their relative importance, but rather to give Perl the attention that it's due. Also, realize that PHP is not a CGI language, and I wouldn't classify JSP as one, either, so you definitely won't find mention of them in Rafe's book as anything other than alternatives to CGI.

So learn some Perl, say from the new "Beginning Perl" book from OReilly, and then get Rafe's book, to learn CGI. "Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours" is worth buying and studying.

Rating:
Summary: Very good book, but lacks in one respect
Review: The real title of this book should be Sams Teach Yourself CGI Programming in Perl in 24 Hours. While all the fundamental principles of CGI are covered, nearly all the programming is done in Perl. Granted that Perl is used extensively to create such programs, it is not the only language used and there should have been more coverage of the other languages. Only one fourteen page hour is devoted to other languages used to write CGI programs. Even then, the treatment is almost exclusively C and Python.
Other than this, the coverage is about as thorough as one can get in the format allowed by this series. The basics of interacting with databases is covered in an example of creating a shopping cart for online purchasing. Critical points of interest such as security and the creation of sensible, helpful error messages are also covered. Given the realities of the e-commerce world, some mention of security should be in every book about web programming. Nothing is more frustrating than attempting to access a page and receiving only the infamous 404 Not Found Error. A delayed redirection is annoying but tolerable. However, nothing more than the 404 error reaches the level of, "I ain't ever coming back here" frustration. The very valuable use of server side includes is also part of the coverage.
If you are someone with a need to learn CGI programming using Perl, then this book deserves four stars. However, if your interest is in CGI programming in another language, then the value drops to a three, because to use the book, nontrivial knowledge of Perl is a necessity.

Rating:
Summary: Good for CGI in Perl, weak on other languages
Review: The real title of this book should be Sams Teach Yourself CGI Programming in Perl in 24 Hours. While all the fundamental principles of CGI are covered, nearly all the programming is done in Perl. Granted that Perl is used extensively to create such programs, it is not the only language used and there should have been more coverage of the other languages. Only one fourteen page hour is devoted to other languages used to write CGI programs. Even then, the treatment is almost exclusively C and Python.
Other than this, the coverage is about as thorough as one can get in the format allowed by this series. The basics of interacting with databases is covered in an example of creating a shopping cart for online purchasing. Critical points of interest such as security and the creation of sensible, helpful error messages are also covered. Given the realities of the e-commerce world, some mention of security should be in every book about web programming. Nothing is more frustrating than attempting to access a page and receiving only the infamous 404 Not Found Error. A delayed redirection is annoying but tolerable. However, nothing more than the 404 error reaches the level of, "I ain't ever coming back here" frustration. The very valuable use of server side includes is also part of the coverage.
If you are someone with a need to learn CGI programming using Perl, then this book deserves four stars. However, if your interest is in CGI programming in another language, then the value drops to a three, because to use the book, nontrivial knowledge of Perl is a necessity.

Rating:
Summary: Very good book, but lacks in one respect
Review: This book is an excellent and well-balanced treatise on the topic of CGI programming with Perl. However, the book says that it teaches you to program CGI in C as well... not quite. I would not say 9 pages out of 490 is sufficient to state that the book covers CGI programming in C. But since far and away most of the CGI programs on the net are written in Perl, I don't believe it is an extremely important topic.

Another thing to note is that if you do not previously know Perl fairly well, you may have a hard time grasping some of the more difficult examples used, such as complex regular expressions.

Now, the reason I did not give it five stars is this: since I have a fairly extensive knowledge of Perl, I can recognize bad practices on the part of the author. Mainly, as you will immediately notice if you purchase this book with a prior knowledge of Perl, the author places WAY too much emphasis and entire program structure on global variables. This is a practice that should be avoided in ALL languages, not excluding Perl. But, it can easily be taken with a grain of salt (as I have done), or you can rewrite some of the code so that functions actually accept parameters instead of relying on globals.

But, if you are thinking of buying the book, I highly recommend doing so. However, if you do not yet know Perl, I would first read Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours by Clinton Pierce, as it is the best beginners guide to Perl I've seen out there.

By the way, this review applies to the first version of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for quick start
Review: This is a well written book to obtain a quick understanding of CGI.

Rating:
Summary: so much to learn
Review: To be a real web designer you need to learn perl , CGI ,Asp. I would say this book does a good job.

Even though this titles say 24 hours. More time i think is recomended to fully comprehend correctly CGI. Peace out G. I love's me the Lady's.