Perl Cgi Programming: No Experience Required (No Experience Required)

Rating:
Summary: Perfect book to learn Perl and Common Gateway Interface(CGI)
Review: Great book.. If you have a reasonable amount of knowledge about HTML and Web Page design and want to learn.. Not for the person with Windows 3.* unless your really dedicated.. Wonderful!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent - Highly Recommended
Review: I found this book to be a great introduction to both Perl and CGI programming. This book is genuinely trying to teach you, unlike some books where the author is attempting to show you how clever he/she is. Also includes useful examples, and the syntax reference library in the appendix is essential once you are experienced with Perl & CGI. I am very pleased I purchased this book and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be up and running with Perl CGI programming in the shortest possible period.

Rating:
Summary: Good on CGI theory -- needs better proofreading
Review: I have several years experience with the web, html and graphics. I've dabbled in programming a bit, and found this book useful in explaining how CGI worked (an overview of the concept). But, it was frustrating in parts because Eric (or the typesetter) mades some mistakes and the Guestbook program won't run. I wrote to Sybex and pointed the error out. Just in case you are stuck there - on page 168 he calls a variable "$RecordSize". Then, on page 176 refers to that same variable as "$GuestEntrySize". If you type it the way it's printed - it won't work! I wonder if they tried the program first?

Rating:
Summary: Excellent - Highly Recommended
Review: The book is excellent, but I noticed that one of the examples didn't work on my system(Win 98, Sambar Server, Perl 5). In chapter 2 and 3 it mentions and examines code that uses subroutines, but on my system it returned a false value from the subroutine and an error. To correct this put 1; directly below the entire subroutine 'sub name {subroutine code} 1;' Thanks to Amazon's Perl for Dummies for pointing out that workaround. I would recommend both books as complements of each other. Perl for Dummies describes in more detail with less example, and Perl CGI Programming has detailed examples with little explaination.