Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

First off, she didn’t even get started with user exercises until Chapter 7. (I can already use a web server, thank you– she doesn’t need six chapters to explain the subject) And it would be nice if she included the HTML form examples along with the corresponding perl/CGI scripts that processed the data generated. As it stands, she has a chapter which tells you how to create a form, and then two chapters later, when she gets to the perl/CGI examples, they don’t correspond to anything that’s been covered in earlier chapters pertaining to form data. I had a much easier time following a quickie online tutorial.

I cannot advise strenuously enough against purchasing this book.
Rating: 1 / 5

This is a jumpstart tutorial book, so anyone looking for a comprehensive guide to either Perl or CGI will be disappointed. (But the title of the book series makes this pretty obvious.) I’m an experienced programmer, and I’ve had some experience with Python, a language very similar to Perl in some ways, but nevertheless I found this book helpful, even if it is somewhat simplistic. It provides a good, if shallow, introduction to the possibilities of the Perl language and CGI. This book is enough to get your feet wet; it is not enough to make you a competent web application developer. But once you finish this book, you can move on to something more substantial. What I like about this book is the way the author continues to repeat certain basic concepts, so that a beginner won’t get tangled up and lost. (Things like the “here” document and “default” variable, for example, can throw the beginner for a loop.) So overall, I think this book is a pretty good starting point for Perl and CGI.

Absolute beginner programmers may still find this book too complex. There is a certain assumption of familiarity with basic programming concepts. But if you have even a small amount of experience with even a simple language like BASIC, you should be fine.
Rating: 4 / 5

I’m a PERL beginner. I checked out several books from the library and this one, PERL and CGI, was the best fit. It gives a very good overview of what PERL is and its syntax. After just a couple of hours of reading I think I could start writing my own simple scripts. Easy to read and understand. I liked it so much I bought a copy from Amazon to keep as a reference! Not as an exhaustive reference –it’s not that –but as a reference for all the common techniques and principles. Although there are a lot of illustrations, they’re not really critical to the book. My only criticism is that the print in the pictures is so small it’s hard to read.
Rating: 5 / 5