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Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web, Second Edition (Visual QuickStart Guide)
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List Price: $24.99
Our Price: $6.99
Your Save: $18.00 ( 72% )
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Manufacturer: Peachpit Press
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.2762
EAN: 9780201735680
ISBN: 0201735687
Label: Peachpit Press
Manufacturer: Peachpit Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2001-06-08
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Studio: Peachpit Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Comment: I ALWAYS buy the Peachpit Press books for everything I need to learn. I bought one for Photoshop, HTML, Studio 10, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, VB, etc. They are straight forward and to-the-point and great books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I checked it out from a library and liked it so much I bought it!
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to Perl
Comment: This was one of the first books I read to learn Perl and it provides an excellent introduction to Perl. At the beginning I think it could use a little bit more hand holding as some other books do, but if you are familiar with any syntax in a programming language you should be just fine. Even if you are one of those that did need to get another book to get you through the hand holding of learning to program for the first time with Perl, you will quickly find yourself wondering how to do things with Perl and this book will probably answer your questions so I think this book is indispensable for anyone that wants to learn Perl.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Really hard to follow
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice try, but disappointing
Comment: I have some experience with Perl and no experience with CGI, so I was looking for a book that would help me make the transition to using CGI. After looking around a lot, there did not seem to be a clear choice. Most of the books were aimed at someone who knew nothing about either or already had a solid background in both and wanted to increase their skill level. I finally decided to try this book.
I have only previously purchased one other book in the Visual Quickstart Guide series (PageMaker 7 for Windows and MacIntosh). I soon learned that there is a difference in a book written about an application and a book written about programming. Although this series may work nicely for an application with menus and so forth, the picture format is not that helpful when learning programming. Probably the first thing I noticed was that many of the "screen shots" were in Spanish. Although the text is in English, many of the examples are not. (HTML, Perl, and CGI are "universal" languages, but plain text--the web page content--is not.) Although this is not an insurmountable problem, it did make following the examples more difficult. Therefore, I removed a "half star" from the rating for this weakness. (Let's face it, how hard would it be to type 20 scripts using a different language and change the screen shots in the book?)
The author stated that the book's format would not allow printing everything (there is a clue there), but that you could download the files from one of two sites. Although you have interaction of three different structures (HTML, Perl, and CGI), you may not see them all in the book for any given exercise, and some of them will not be complete. Here is an typical example:
1. The author presents a screen shot of the HTML page that generates the values being used. It does not include a listing of the underlying HTML markup. Therefore, the reader has to guess based on the appearance of the web page what the underlying markup looks like--including variable names and types. You will find as the exercises get more complex, that guessing becomes very difficult without resorting to examining the downloaded files.
2. The author shows a snippet of the Perl program, revealing the new content. You are assumed to have already mastered the rest of the program to some extent.
3. A final screen shot that reveals what the output looks like.
4. The book's text that accompanies these images uses generic phrases such as "Type 'name', where name is the content of the HTML form element's NAME attribute."
By sitting back and pondering each exercise, you can figure things out, but it is unacceptable (in my opinion, at least) to make the reader work so hard to put all the pieces together when the author could have cited a specific example in the book. Therefore, I removed another star from the rating for this combination of weaknesses.
In some cases the text is not related to the images at all. As an example, I cannot comprehend how the text and images on page 144 (that discusses referring to multiple items in an array) go together. The instructions refer to text that does not appear anywhere in the screen shots. Therefore, I removed another "half star" from the rating for this, since it happens more than once. (It makes me wonder if anyone put anything beyond a cursory effort into proofreading this book.)
The Visual Quickstart Guide series promotes itself as a source where you can get what you need by going directly to the relevant chapters and using it partly as a reference rather than as a tutorial. Unfortunately, programming does not work like that unless you already understand the content presented earlier in the book. In my opinion, unless your CGI needs are very minimal, you will need to read the entire book in order to establish a working knowledge of this topic. I do not consider that either a strength or weakness of the book. It is more the nature of the subject matter. Still, if you plan to purchase this book and scan for a few ideas and be "up and running in no time" as the book cover claims, you will be disappointed. (Unless you already understand the topic and will just use the book as a reference to remind you of certain commands or formats.)
While writing this review, I realized that this is not a standalone book. Although I did not spend an extensive amount of time in other books, I did need to refer to other Perl and HTML books occasionally to grasp the concepts being presented, probably spending an hour in each to supplement and better explain various topics discussed in this book. For a book aimed at beginning and intermediate programmers, I believe this is unacceptable. The author does suggest that if you need to brush up on HTML that you should buy her other book(!), and she also says that this book (Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web) is not an exhaustive guide to Perl. I suppose this could be taken to warn the reader that they need some knowledge of both before using the book, but I believe the coverage for a "beginner" is too sparse. It would not have killed them to add another 50 pages to the content and explain things more thoroughly. Although it is possible for people with zero knowledge of any of these elements (HTML, Perl, and CGI) to put something together using this book, I suspect that most of them will get things done more as a result of copying what they see than really understanding what they are doing. Therefore, I removed another star from the rating.
Overall, I rate Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web at 2 stars out of 5. You can learn some Perl and CGI from this book. Unfortunately, the process is more difficult and confusing than it needs to be. Although this book has great potential, I believe it needs a major rewrite--perhaps even by a different author who has a better "teaching" ability to "Teach yourself Perl and CGI scripting the quick and easy way!" as the cover claims.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Perl is one of the most popular scripting languages for adding powerful interactive features to Web pages. Perl lets you place forms on your site that collect and process user input such as comments and product orders; enables visitors to search for information; and can integrate a database into your site, among its many other capabilities. Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide fully revised and updated since its original 1998 release, gets users to the core of CGI scripting with Perl. Even first-time programmers will be able to create useful, workable scripts from scratch, or adapt and customize existing scripts to their own needs. Hundreds of screen shots and clear, easy-to-understand directions make this the perfect Perl book for beginners, as well as a handy reference for those with previous programming experience.
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