On Sep 15, 2004, at 9:14 PM, Wiggins d'Anconia wrote:
I would echo Chris' remarks about mod_perl, and the book not being worth its oats if it shys away from using CGI.pm. Personally I would skip *all* of the CGI books, and get a good book on Perl itself. Learn the language not how to use it for a specific task. This will serve you in everything you do much better in the long run, then once you have learned Perl basics, it should be trivial to read any module's documentation to absorb the API and apply it. CGI.pm has excellent docs, as do some of the other CGI helping tools, such as the various template systems, and modules like CGI::Application. This path will also serve you well when it comes time to learn DBI for your database access, or any other module you need for core logic. There are also excellent free online tutorials to teach you basic CGI programming, Ovid's comes highly endorsed (google). CGI just isn't that difficult, -> print a header, maybe include a cookie or two, do a redirect, that's about it, the rest is just time and experience.
The two books I would suggest are Learning Perl and its sequence Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules. I give comments about them as well as other Perl books on my site.
I would echo Wiggins comments, but throw in a couple of different books.
Learning Perl is very good, but Programming Perl (the camel book) is more comprehensive.
Even better, though, is the Perl Cookbook (sheep). Once you have the basics of Perl down, the Cookbook offers a wide variety of very helpful short scriptlets that solve specific problems (often 2 or 3 different ways to solve the problem). Frequently you can create very useful scripts simply by chaining 2 or 3 recipes from the cookbook together with little to no thought. Quite handy at increasing productivity.
Those two books should hold you in good stead. From there, since you're doing a lot of database backend stuff, you might want to look at Programming the Perl DBI (Cheetah), which, of course, covers the DBI module for communicating with your backend databases.
And, just to make your code while you're doing so that much more efficient, Learning Perl References, Objects and Modules (llama) makes chapters 8-12 of the camel book a little easier to digest.
Really, though, the latter two books are just nice supplemental information. The camel book and the cookbook are more than enough to cover everything you need to know.
Chad A Gard http://www.percussionadvocates.com/chad
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