Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)

By Elizabeth Castro

Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide gets you to the heart of Perl scripting with CGI. Even first-time programmers will be able to create interactive Web pages and, more... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020135358X
• ISBN13: 9780201353587
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Peachpit Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

a windfall for the freshman

This book is not just another massive tome guaranteed to baffle the novice. Unlike other works on Perl and CGI scripting, Elizabeth Castro lets you test your own scripts by installing a personal server downloadable from the web. The chapter 'Unix Essentials' serves as a basic phrase book of Unix commands, a blessing for CGI neophytes like myself. This slim volume is packed with punch because instead of having to plow through pages and pages of enigmatic codes, you can check the scripts you write in the chapters by comparing them to the downloaded material. The illustrations are easy to understand although some prior knowledge of HTML is assumed. If that's not the case, you can use the downloaded forms as a beginning point for creating your own designs. In short, this condensed volume really delivers what it promises and is a windfall for freshman programmers like myself.

Excellent Book

This was an excellent book for the beginner or nonprogramer. In as small as this book is it does cover quite a lot. Codes are all through the book. It covers HTML forms. It talks about working with strings, conditional statements, arrays. Covers working with cookies. Was very simple to understand and very informative.

One of the most accesible instrucional books I have read!.

I have read several "Visual Quickstart Guides" and this is one of the best. It is extremely accessible to beginning programmers and useful for the novice. Elizabeth Casto put a great deal of time and effort into making sure that her instructions were detailed and consistent. If you have little experience with programming and want to jump into CGI Scripts and PERL this book is a great place to start.

This book is exactly what you need to jump start into perl

I have purchased numerous books on CGI and Perl and most of them were scholarly and complete, but none did what this book did, and that is actually get my problems solved. The term "Quickstart" is acurate, the book dove right in to building forms and processing them with Perl and I have made more progress with this one book than I have with the other 3 combined. I would buy any book written by this author.

Perl for the non-programmer!

I was waiting for this book! Unlike the standard Perl reference, which had me tearing out my hair, this one does not assume you already know other languages, though it does assume you have familiarity with basic HTML.This book won't take you far into perl but as far as it goes, holds your hand and is very focused on what's needed to do cgi scripts. At just over 260 pp it is less daunting than the standard reference. Castro explains different data types ( scalars, arrays, etc.); shows how to create a cgi script; how to set permissions; how to set up forms on your html page so the data you receive is labelled right and how to analyze it; use of basic perl functions; how to access external files from a script; and more. She tells you what information you have to get from your ISP in order to set up and access your cgi scripts.Most helpfully, each section is heavily cross-referenced to minimize fruitless flipping back and forth trying to understand examples.Even so, a beginner will doubtless find some things confusing.