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Perl @ Web Programming
Programming Shed : Programmer Store & Resources |
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Perl Index - Perl Book :
Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition)
by Elizabeth Castro Paperback: 336 pages Dimensions (in inches): 0.69 x 8.98 x 7.04 Publisher: Peachpit Press ISBN: 0201735687; 2nd edition (May 2001) New edition of a resource that shows how to create useful new scripts or adapt existing ones to individual needs. Castro (author of several books about the Web) tells how to set up and install a local server in order to learn Perl and test scripts without signing up with a commercial Web host; place forms on Web sites that collect and process user input such as product orders and comments; use CGI.pm, the standard Perl module for analyzing incoming form data; and how to debug and use security techniques. Customer Reviews Reviewer: Jose Antonio Padros from México D.F. (I have the spanish version of this book.) I needed a script to register client's data. This book took me from just a vague knowledge of perl --which I got from useful webpages-- to writing a script with cookies to recoginse returning users, logging to record usage of my site and security tips to reasonably understand vulnerability and do something about it. I highly recommend it for newbies (such as myself). Reviewer: davorg from London, UK Let's be honest, the first edition of this book really wasn't very good. Sure it was good at transfering knowledge from the page into the head of the reader, but the knowledge that it was transfering had some huge flaws in it. The first edition was firmly based in the Matt Wright school of writing CGI programs. There were a lot of very nasty scripts written by people who read the first edition of this book (I know because I hang out on the support web site). So now we have a new edition. Is it better? Well I have to say that it was because I was a technical reviewer :) It _is_ better. It covers an number of things that the first edition missed out - CGI.pm, -w, use strict, taint mode. Learning about any of these will make you a much better Perl programmer. However, these concepts all make writing programs harder. You need to think a little more about what you're doing. You need to think like a programmer. And I'm still not convinced that the book's approach to teaching programming is really aimed at teaching the "practice of programming". It's certainly the best of the beginners Perl and CGI boks out there at the moment, but that's not a particularly difficult field to beat. Reviewer: David Stanley from Guelph, Ontario, Canada 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. Reviewer: webfielding from Scottsbluff, NE I taught myself CGI programming with the first edition of this book a couple of years ago, and have spent most of the ensuing time as a professional web programmer. This alone is testament to the effectiveness of Castro's teaching/writing ability. The second edition does add much that was missing from the first edition, such as the "use strict" pragma that forces programmers to declare variables, and the CGI.pm library that, for one, circumvents the tedium of parsing form data. Arguably the most important edition, however, is the discussion of setting up a local test environment, but it is also in this area that the book falls short. In particular I find it bothersome that the author does not recommend installing Apache as a test environment. After all, Apache is the environment under which most CGI scripts will eventually run on virtual web hosts running the Linux/Unix operating system. So by testing with Apache for Windows, you will be emulating the actual production environment of the script much more closely than by using the other web servers that are recommended. In fact, there are a number of (free) products on the market that bundle Apache and Perl together, so that you don't have to go through the extra step of downloading and installing Perl seperately from the web server software, as in the book's examples. Another sin of omission is that no consideration is given to the persistent storage of data, other than cumbersome text files. However, this has been one of the areas in which the greatest strides have been made since the first edition. Retrieval and storage of data from web applications, using some sort of database, are practically a given today. Perhaps the author thought that a discussion of the Perl DBI (Database Interface) would be too much of a digression, and would involve setting up additional database software. However, a few of the same bundles I mentioned above not only include Apache and Perl, but also the mySQL database engine. At the very least I think there should have been discussion of the very simple "DBM" database system available on almost all Unix systems. Perl makes it very easy to store hash arrays to disk in this format, and just as easy to import them into hashes. This would at least provide readers with a stepping stone to eventually investigating the more robust DBI library. So I rate the content a 5, but I take off one point for what the book lacks. |
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