Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours

About this book

A quick, easy-to-understand tutorial on how to create interactive Web pages with CGI and Perl. CGI continues to be a core technology for Web development--it is still one of the most common methods of implementing interactivity on a Web site. Readers will learn to add survey forms, guest books, order forms, search tools, interactive games, and other types of interactivity to Web pages. This new edition is updated to include recent developments in CGI and Perl scripting, includes templating systems and mod_perl server add-ons. Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours teaches the reader the next step beyond simple HTML Web pages. This new edition covers implementing CGI with both C and Perl, and it discusses CGI's relative strengths and weaknesses in comparison with other Web programming technologies like JavaScript, Java, and PHP. The book takes the reader from the basics of CGI -- learning, for example, how to implement and customize existing CGI programs that have been written by others -- to the point where he can use CGI to create his own programs from scratch. The book also provides numerous real-life examples of CGI scripts--database search tools, survey forms, interactive games, order forms, guest books, and more. Rafe Colburn is a Web technologist at TriNet Services, where he specializes in designing large corporate Internet and Intranet sites. He is the co-author of several books for Sams, including Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML in 21 Days and Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition.