Rating: 
Summary: Still worth reading today
Review: The Offical Guide to Programming with CGI is an introductory level text covering Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module. CGI.pm is the standard perl module for working with CGI. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is the standard interface by which external programs can interace with web servers. The text assumes the reader has at least a beginner's knowledge of Perl and HTML. For instance, readers are assumed to know how to use modules, but no prior knowledge of object oriented perl is required. Likewise, the reader should have a passing familiarity with HTML tags, forms in particular. This book is particularly beginner friendly.The reader should be able to walk away from the book with the ability to create simple websites which take and respond to user input. The potential CGI.pm programmer will gain a fundamental knowledge of the module, its interface, and how it may be used to generate HTML. The text also includes a very detailed reference guide which may appeal to those people who prefer to hold what they're reading. While the book was published back in 1998, it hasn't become outdated. It is pleasantly surprising that CGI.pm's interface has changed so little. Support for new standards like XHTML have been added since the book was originally published, but have had little net effect on the use of CGI.pm itself. Why CGI? Isn't that the way people used to write dynamic web pages? Yes. And where portability concerns outweigh performance, it still is. Also, if you're a relative novice or don't have an endless supply of round tuits, CGI programming may present the lowest barrier of entry into dynamic web programming. Even if you later move on to one of the newer templating systems a fundamental knowledge of CGI.pm and how it works will still be useful. Not to mention that some of the templating systems for instance HTML::Mason will run on top of CGI, even though most are primarily designed to work with Apache and mod_perl. For those who would appreciate a short description of what mod_perl is, it basically puts a copy of Perl inside the Apache executable making powerful hooks available to perl scripts and avoiding the overhead of executing a separate process for each CGI script. The author of the book, Lincoln Stein, is also the author of the module itself. In the book, Stein takes the reader through a gradual progression of scenarios and solutions. The explanations are thorough and the pace gradually takes the reader into more advanced topics. In short, it is a concise introduction to CGI programming with Perl. Low level details, like how CGI works under the hood and more advanced topics like security, cascading style sheets, javascript, and persistence are touched upon but not covered in particular depth. The author does however provide many timely references to books and websites where the reader can find more information on those topics.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: This book helped me make the transition to object oriented perl. Oh yeah, and it's filled with all the CGI you'll need. Thank you Lincoln Stein!!
Rating:
Summary: Tons of CGI Perl books out there? Get this offical one first
Review: This book is an excellent concise guide for covering nearly all issues of CGI programming with Perl. Since Perl has been very popular for CGI programming, there are tons of resources out there on the web and lots of books about this topic but you will all start with
use CGI;
Learn it from it's CREATOR and OFFICIAL guide covering topics from multipage applications to extending CGI classes to meet you needs.
Rating:
Summary: Easy Web Magic
Review: This book is so easy to read and understand. In about two days I was using cookies to maintain state, I have since writen a form mailer that puts data into csv, and a bunch of other cool stuff. EASY, a fast read, and you'll be able to jump right in and do a lot of cool stuff immediately.
Rating:
Summary: Easy Web Magic
Review: This book is so easy to read and understand. In about two days I was using cookies to maintain state, I have since writen a form mailer that puts data into csv, and a bunch of other cool stuff. EASY, a fast read, and you'll be able to jump right in and do a lot of cool stuff immediately.
Rating: 
Summary: A potential winner with a few first-edition problems.
Review: This book will be an absolute necessity for CGI programmers writing in Perl. It's a description of a must-use tool by the tool's creator. It goes well beyond the online and POD documentation for CGI.pm. The example code snippets and programs are well chosen. There are a few problems: the organization of the reference section is confusing, and the descriptions of table(), Tr(), and td() don't explain how to enter attributes. (But the table examples show how to do that, so it's not much of a problem.) Summary: if you write CGI in Perl, get this book and use it.
Rating:
Summary: Best Tool for Perl CGI Programming
Review: This has been the one most valuable tool I have used for web programming in Perl. It simplifies CGI programming and makes code much, much cleaner. The examples are excellent. The book is shorter than I expected, but a lot is packed into those pages, including everything you need.
Rating: 
Summary: Information is invaluable but organization needs work
Review: This is an invaluable book for using an invaluable library module (if you do CGI coding). There is absolutely no substitute for CGI.pm. However, this book is very frustrating to use because the Reference Guide section is organized into different weird categories instead of just listing all the functions in CGI.pm in alphabetical order (like in Perl books, for example). Therefore the reader has to try to figure out what category a function in the module belongs in in order to look it up. Very very aggravating! In fact I trained a group of developers in using CGI.pm and many of them avoided using it because it takes so long to find what you're looking for in the reference section of the book. I am hoping for a new edition of the book SOON with this problem corrected. The material is invaluable, but I have to give three stars because of poor organization.
Rating: 
Summary: Create Web CGI scripts in Perl with simplicity and elegance
Review: When I first discovered the power of Perl for writing Web CGI scripts, I was on the top of the world. "I can do anything!" I thought. A few weeks later the gloss had worn away a bit as I found myself in the vexing position of rewriting the same tedious pieces of code multiple times, and, worse, making the same mistakes repeatedly. So I did what programmers have always done: I wrote a small subroutine library to make my life easier. I called it "CGI.pm." This library takes care of all the details of parsing fill-out forms, producing syntactically correct HTML, and creating the HTTP header. A complete interactive page can be as short and sweet as this one: #!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI ':standard'; print header,
start_html(-title=>'Short and Sweet'),
h1("'Tis a Gift to be Simple"),
start_form,
"Type your name:",textfield(-name=>'Name'),
submit,
end_form; print "You entered ",param('Name') if param(); print end_html; Over a long period of time, this library grew and became more sophisticated. I added support for frames, for cookies, for JavaScripting, and for such esoterica as server push. And as it grew, more and more people discovered it and began to use it for their own CGI scripting. When Perl 5.004 was released, it was adopted as the standard library for Perl CGI scripting. With this book, I share with you all the secrets of CGI.pm, showing you how to use it to create elegant and sophisticated applications of your own, and how to extend and customize the library for your own purposes.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent choice for anyone who wants to write Perl/CGI
Review: Who better to write a book on the CGI.pm module than the author of the module himself. I must admit that I was afraid that the book wouldn't be intelligible given the fact that many brilliant programmers aren't necessarily gifted writers, but he pulled it off very well! A basic knowledge of Perl is helpful in getting the most out of this book. I would strongly recommend reading at least the first few chapters of "Learning Perl" for people without any other programming skills, or the first few chapters of "Programming Perl" for those coming to Perl from another language. I found that using this book in conjunction with "MySQL and Perl for the Web" gave me a great experience. Even though the latter book sounds like it is aimed more at the DB end, it has a couple good chapters on getting up and running with Perl/CGI and mod_perl. Was also quite thankful that Lincoln covered both the traditional and Object-Oriented interfaces to the module. Great Book!
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