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Perl @ Web Programming
Programming Shed : Programmer Store & Resources |
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Perl Index - Perl Book :
Perl Web Site Workshop
by Jason Pellerin, Molly E. Holzschlag Paperback: 312 pages Dimensions (in inches): 0.78 x 9.16 x 7.26 Publisher: Sams ISBN: 0672322757; 2nd edition (December 20, 2001) Perl Web Site Workshop is aimed at Web designers and developers who want to add Perl-based CGI applications and functions to their Web sites using pre-fabricated scripts that can quickly and easily be customized to suit their needs. It teaches the reader how to adapt and customize pre-programmed scripts for: Forms, Guestbooks, Time displays, Link checkers and debuggers, Browser detectors, Cookies, Hit counters, User polls, Games, Publishing templates, modules, and utilities, Portals. About the Author: There is little doubt that in the world of Web design and development, Molly E. Holzschlag is one of the most vibrant personalities around. With twenty Web development book titles to her credit, Molly is also an engaging speaker and teacher, appearing regularly at such conferences as Comdex, Internet World, Web 2001, and Web Builder. Honored as one of the Top 25 Women on the Web, Molly is an advisory board member to he World Organization of Webmasters, a member of the Web Standards Project, and spent a year as Executive Editor of WebReview. For more about MollyUs books, articles, events, and Web-related activities, drop by (where else?) molly/. Jason Pellerin is Senior Web Applications Developer at Playboy, which involves far less nudity, and far more Perl, than you might think. Before that, he was the SysAdmin at the late, lamented Bungie Software, where he was responsible for keeping the online carnage humming on bungie, and selling inappropriate t-shirts to minors through the Bungie Store. Jason has a BA in philosophy from Yale University, two cats, and a strange affection for cursed baseball teams. Customer Reviews Reviewer: pixeltwiddler from Salt Lake City, UT Folks, if you can understand what the programmer is doing and saying in this book, you can certainly learn to code Perl for yourself (without the book). It's woefully devoid of whys and what-fors, and makes plenty of assumptions (though claiming otherwise) about your aptitude and disposition regarding Perl-related information - Unix, for example. Holy smoke! I'm just as much a proponent of understanding foundation technology as the next guy, but there is absolutely no reason at all in today's Mac/PC Web development environments to learn the bevy of esoteric Unix commands shoveled out in the book. None! Not to mention the Unix processes and programs only casually thrown out a single time in passing, as if the target audience (aspiring Perl/Unix people) is going to understand it all. Most of the code in the book, as is much else written using CGI.PM is overly obfuscated and complex. The browser detection and cookie routines used in the book are about four times more complex than need be. This might be okay if one were just going to plug it in and go... something not possible. The bulk of the book is made up of explanation regarding how to employ these code snippets. It's rough going. Internationalization and other Web usability issues seem to have been overlooked. Example: The taint-checking subroutine strips away all but basic alphanumeric and common/benign punctuation characters. That's no small oversight in an install-it-ready-to-use package. I bought this book with mild interest A) as research for a class I teach, B) because it was recent, and C) I appreciate what Molly H. does elsewhere. I was disappointed to discover that it isn't much better than the several others I've read from years ago onward (Website Automation Toolkit, Drag 'n' Drop CGI, etc.) Molly seems outside of her area of specialty, and Jason, as good as his Playboy.com coding/work may have been [wink, wink], provides too much in the way of program-busting typos and convolution. Something nice: The Perl scripts themselves are valuable enough as instruction to buy the book for, at a discount. Many of the security and development considerations talked about throughout the book are highly useful. If you want a more intuitive approach to learning Perl while gaining instant applications, then I suggest something like 'Custom CGI Scripting with Perl' by Kevin Hanegan. It has some typographical proplems too, but is _muuuch_ easier to understand and work through for the right brain-inclined beginner. |
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