Writing CGI Applications with Perl Review

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(More customer reviews)There are a very large number of Perl CGI books in the shops. Unfortunately the number of good Perl CGI books is far smaller. I'm happy to report that this book is one of them.
The problem, of course, with most Perl CGI books is that they are written by people who just don't know very much Perl. That's certainly not the case here. Both Kevin and Brent are well-respected members of the Perl community and they know what they are talking about when it comes to writing CGI programs in Perl.
Another common mistake in Perl CGI books is that the authors try to take people who know a bit of HTML and teach them programming, Perl and CGI all at the same time. The authors of this book realise that this approach is likely to lead to, at best, patchy understanding of any of these concepts so they aim there book at people who are already programmers and who have some knowledge of Perl. This means that they can concentrate of teaching the parts of Perl that are useful when writing CGI programs.
One corner that is often cut when discussing CGI programming is security. This is a very dangerous approach to take as a badly written CGI program can leave your web server open to attack from anyone on the Internet. That's not a mistake that is made here as the authors introduce security in chapter 2. Add to that the fact that the code examples all use -w, use strict and CGI.pm and the book is already head and shoulders above most of its competition.
Early chapters look at common CGI requirements such as file uploads and cookies. Each chapter is full of well written (and well-explained) sample code. The example of an access counter in chapter 6 even locks the file containing the current count - this is possibly a first in a Perl CGI book!
By the middle of the book we have already moved beyond simple CGI programming and are looking at mod_perl. This chapter covers both the "faux-CGI" Apache::Registry module and also writing complete mod_perl handlers.
In the second half of the book we start to look at some bigger examples. The authors present a web-based email system and even a shopping cart. In order to fit these examples into their respective chapters a couple of corners have been cut, but there's enough information there to enable anyone to write the complete systems.
Chapter 13 introduces the HTML::Mason module as a way to separate content from presentation. It's obvious that the author's are big fans of this module and this leads to my only real criticism of the book. At no point do they mention the fact that the same benefits can be gained from using any of half a dozen templating systems found on the CPAN. I would have been a lot happier if they had mentioned things like Text::Template, HTML::Template and the Template Toolkit before picking HTML::Mason as the system for their example.
There are then two more long chapters with examples of a document management system and image manipulation software. Once more the code in these examples would serve as a greating starting point for anyone wanting to implement something along these lines. The last chapter looks at XML and, in particular, the use of RSS files to provide data feeds to other web sites.
All in all this is a very useful book for someone wanting to write web-based applications using Perl. It's packed full of good advice and code that follows all of the best practices for writing CGI programs in Perl. This book won't teach you Perl, but if you've read Learning Perl or Elements of Programming with Perl then you'll find this book easy enough to follow.

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Writing CGI Applications with Perl is a start-to-finish guide to accomplishing key Web development tasks by fully using the power of Perl and CGI together. Using extensive examples, careful line-by-line explanations, and skill-stretching exercises, it not only provides useful cut-and-paste code: it also teaches the practical skills and techniques you'll need to build virtually any CGI-based application. Kevin Meltzer and Brent Michalski cover every key area of Web application development with Perl: database integration, form and file handling, security, e-mail, graphics, and more. The book's in-depth coverage includes: working with HTML Web forms and obtaining user input; placing cookies and tracking clicks; connecting to POP3 e-mail servers; embedding Perl in HTML using HTML::Mason; remote file management across the Web; creating dynamic images; and working with XML. The book also provides detailed explanations and examples of working with Perl DBI, as well as start-to-finish coverage of configuring and using the popular mod_perl Apache module. All of the sample code will be available at a companion web site.

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