Rating: 
Summary: Educational and always useful
Review: This volume is not for the absolute beginner Perl programmer, nor is it for anyone who wants to just plug ready-written software into a web site.If, however, you understand some Perl and are prepared to follow along with the explanations of the thousands of line of Perl in this book you will have a marvellous resource. One of the authors, Matt Wright, is famous for his archive of free scripts written in Perl and the book builds on this material. It includes a CD-ROM with over 10,000 lines of Perl code that give you a large number of complete scripts and some useful subroutines. The book gives line by line explanations of all of this code. I've used both snippets of code and complete CGI programs from this book as starting points for my own work many times. More than enough times to justify the cost of the book. Once you've worked through a few of the more complex examples you should improve your understanding of Perl and CGI enormously, I certainly did. Some reviewers have mentioned that they thought the scripts were difficult to install or not enough effort was given to explaining the install process. I felt the opposite, I had little problem in getting the scripts to work and the problems I did have tended top be because of my lack of total understanding of CGI, web servers and Perl, solving them was an education in itself. There is also a web site with corrected (yes, there are some typos and bugs) and upgraded copies of the examples and an email list for installing and modifying the examples, an excellent resource on top of the book. I would recommend this book to almost everyone.
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