CGI Programming with Perl

Amazon.com
The appearance of the second edition of CGI Programming with Perl heralds the beginning of the neoclassical era of Web service. CGI--or common gateway interface--is the original back end for client-driven, dynamic Web-page service and deserves consideration as the Romulus of the Internet Empire. But, where first-edition author Gundavaram described the lonely Romulus laying the brick foundation of dynamic Web-page service in 1996, second-edition collaborators Guelich and Birznieks have pitched in to resurrect Romulus amid the crowded streets of modern Rome. Why bother? Surely four years have brought technological revolutions (Java, PHP, ASP, ColdFusion) that render CGI's original brick-by-brick approach as obsolete as, say, Roman mythology--or bricks and mortar.

And yet not. It is an ambiguous blessing that the original CGI persists, adhering to the underside of Web service by the duct tape that is Perl. This point is not missed by Guelich, Gundavaram, and Birznieks, whose advocacy of CGI is both bolstered by the growing applications module base of Perl and tempered by their awareness of CGI's structural limitations. Both new and returning readers of CGI Programming with Perl should browse the last chapter first in order to appreciate the proposed solutions to CGI's greatest sin: its impractical slowness in a world of a million-hits-per-day Web service. The chapter describes CGI-compatible FastCGI and mod_perl technologies that circumvent the process-spawning slowness of the simple CGI. Advanced users might want to skip directly to O'Reilly's fine mod_perl tome, Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C, by Lincoln Stein and Doug MacEachern.

The authors' second pass at CGI pedagogy is a lucid, honest, and expanded account that develops functionality of dynamic Web pages in a rational progression--from HTML client-server and CGI syntax basics to general input/output, forms, e-mail, graphics, and simple database applications, including maintaining client state and data persistence under the otherwise stateless HTTP protocol. The authors offer synopses of cookies, JavaScripting, server security, and XML, all of which are described in detail in other books.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

CGI Programming with Perl shows how to use CGI to deliver dynamic content on your web site. Based on the best-selling CGI Programming on the World Wide Web, this edition has been completely rewritten to demonstrate current techniques available with the CGI.pm module and the latest versions of Perl. The book starts by explaining how CGI and the underlying HTTP protocol work, and then moves quickly into the important details of developing CGI programs." "CGI Programming with Perl is a starting point for anyone who wants to program in CGI and already knows some Perl. With its emphasis on current techniques and technologies, this is the next generation book on CGI.

SYNOPSIS

The World Wide Web is more than a place to put up clever documents and pretty pictures. With a little study and practice, you can offer interactive queries and serve instant information from databases, worked up into colorful graphics. That is what the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) offers.

This book offers a comprehensive explanation of CGI and related techniques for people who hold on to the dream of providing their own information servers on the Web. This edition has been completely rewritten to use the current techniques available in version 5 of Perl and two popular Perl modules, CGI.pm and CGI_lite.

Good scripting is not limited to a knowledge of CGI -- you need to know something about other programming tools that organize data and make the output look attractive. Gundavaram starts at the beginning, explaining the value of CGI and how it works, and takes you swiftly into the subtle details of programming. The book offers a comprehensive look at the job of providing information dynamically on the Web.

Topics include: Basic Perl techniques for parsing and output Embedding Server Side Includes (SSI) Graphics and simple animation Controlling browser caching Forms and magic cookies Gateways and SQL processing Internet communications FastCGI mod_perl Examples of games, imagemap manipulation, and other advanced applications

FROM THE CRITICS

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