Chris Devers wrote:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, hcohen2 wrote:
[...] "CGI Programming 101: Programming Perl for the WWW" and is a 2004 publication. The first 6 chapters are on line, so I can get some idea of the book's value by going through those chapters.
...and the URL for that is... ?
Here? <http://www.cgi101.com/book/>
Yes, that's it.
However, there is a reader's review of the first edition that seems to ring true and, moreover, is not complimentary.
...and the URL for that is... ?
Here? <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0966942604>
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966942612/qid=1095287768/sr=ka-2/ref=pd_ka_2/104-9750707-3239905
No on this page, also well down the page - here is a partial quote:
"The first 40 pages are useful to give you the sense of how CGI functionality is implemented in Perl. However by staying away from the most used standard Perl module for CGI programming (i.e. the CGI module) except for a few pages towards the end, the reader is ill served ..."
The criticism was that the CGI.pm was not hardly at all and only near the end of the book. Sorry, I rewrote this several times, but it still was not clear what I meant. Perhaps I should have used the quote I pasted above.
That reader maintains the first 40 pages are good, but due to the choice of using the CGI package only modestly devalues the contents. The other four reviewers were much more taken with this book.
Well, I'm not sure about that -- there's not really anything wrong with using the CGI module for CGI scripts, and indeed there's a lot to be said for letting it do as much of the heavy lifting as possible.
You may want to look at the _Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm_, which was written by Lincoln Stein -- the author of CGI.pm itself:
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471247448/> <http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/stein/>
The book is, if nothing else, definitive.
I scanned a copy, but I think for now it has too much depth for my purposes.
If I thought that I would be doing nothing else other than building web site back ends this might be a valid approach. However, I am really a database applications programmer and at least part of me has be focused on that sort of an end product. Hence, a complete switch to mod_perl is too speculative for me to take that path. Nonetheless, I am going to file this just in case my career takes a completely unexpected turn.
If you really want to get into things though, CGI really isn't the best way to go. Sites developed with mod_perl can be much faster, can handle much more traffic, and you have a lot more control over what happens -- you can, in fact, control just about everything Apache does.
Learning mod_perl can be much more daunting than CGI -- hence the continuing popularity of CGI over mod_perl for new learners -- but in the long run it would be much more useful to understand mod_perl.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Among the books that explain mod_perl (and Apache) are:
* _Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C_ ("the eagle book") <http://modperl.com:9000/> Several chapters are available online
* _Practical mod_perl_ <http://modperlbook.org/> Chapter 6, "Coding with mod_perl in Mind", is online
* _mod_perl Developer's Cookbook_ <http://www.modperlcookbook.org/> Several chapters are available online
* The mod_perl guide -- an online reference <http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/> (main guide) <http://bulknews.net/lib/mod_perl_guide/help.html> (supplements)
These give a decent overview of the documentation available. If you really want to learn this stuff well, mod_perl is the way to go.
