Review by for Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)
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I bought this title back when I was first teaching myself Perl. At the time, I had done some BASIC and VB programming, but knew nothing about Perl and CGI except that it was one of the most common ways to add some interactivity and form handling to a web site.Admittedly, the coverage of the subject is a little light, and the hold-the-novice-user-by-the-hand- style was actually confusing (she should have used the more standard method of using bold, italics, and monospace fonts to indicate output, user required input, and variables) BUT considering I was at the absolute beginner level with respect to Perl and CGI, I feel the book lived up to my expectations. I wanted something to get me started quickly, and not to assume I knew anything about CGI and PERL but did assume that I knew HTML. I did not want a book that would cover the subject matter exhaustively, just give me a basic “Quick-Start” which it did quite well.I continued to use the book as a reference for a few months, though it’s really not laid out well for that purpose. (I would suggest the O’Reilly Perl CD Bookshelf for that) If you know PERL and CGI basics, this one is not for you, but if you’re comfortable with HTML and want to start doing more, It’s worth a try.

Review by James A. Donaldson for Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)
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I just completed a class on writing CGI scripts with Perl, and although this was not part of the reading list for the class, nevertheless it’s what I used to actually learn what I needed to know. This is NOT a book about learning Perl. It is about writing CGI scripts using Perl. You’ll get a decent introduction to Perl syntax and Castro will move you right into applying it to writing CGI scripts, primarily for handling forms. I’m not aware of any other book that gives you exactly what you need (if this is what you’re looking for) in such a nice, compact introduction. The “visual” part of the book (the pictures the previous reviewer is lamenting the absence of), is really just simple “screenshot”-like figures showing what Netscape or Explorer would look like given the particular exercise being explained. No, there are no big color pictures in here, but it’s really not necessary. Prior knowledge of HTML is recommended, but not absolutely necessary as the author spends some time explaining the HTML syntax behind forms.

Review by for Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)
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I have read several other books in an attempt to learn Perl, but they were either too technical or too boring to even hold my interest. This book is the polar opposite. It is the first Perl manual I’ve read that actually explains Perl line by line, in a language that even an old dog novice like myself can understand. Instead of filling the pages with line after line of obscure Perl code without the slightest hint of explanation, the code here is explained beautifully. My questions were answered almost before they came to mind. That is why this book was so effective. I was writing simple cgi’s even before finishing the book. This afternoon, I wrote a cgi that takes input from a lengthy form, prints a confirmation/thank you html page to let the user know that their input was received, sends the parsed and formatted form data via email to the receiving party, and generates an include file that automatically updates an online html log that everyone in the company can see and track. Two weeks ago I couldn’t have possibly done this. Honestly, I wouldn’t even have known where to start. No, this is not a complete Perl training manual, nor is it meant to be. But if you need to use Perl/CGI on the web to process forms and information, there is no better book on the market. I use it everyday and highly recommend it to everyone.

Review by for Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)
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This book is clearly geared towards the non-programmer or beginning programmer. It’s similar to a “Perl CGI for Dummies” book, with an introduction that includes the section “What is a program?”. The author holds your hand every step of the way. If you like step-by-step explanations of what to do, this is the book for you.If you’re a programmer, I’d recommend one of the O’Reilly Perl books, an HTML book, and the “perldoc CGI” documentation that comes free with perl. You might want to borrow this book, as I did, to pick up some tips on forms and cookies.If you don’t know much about programming, you’ll want to investigate books on Java Servlets and JSP as well. Perl and Java are two very different programming languages, and most people will strongly prefer one language over the other.One especially weak section of the book is the chapter on debugging. The author explains how to check the syntax of a Perl script without running it, but doesn’t explain that you can actually run a Perl CGI script from the command line. She also makes the horrendous mistake of not recommending “use strict” and the “-w” switch! There’s also no mention of how to use the perl debugger, or the GUI debugger from ActiveState. I can’t imagine trying to debug my Perl CGI programs using her rudimentary techniques.

Review by Paul Sosbee for Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)
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I have purchased numerous books on CGI and Perl and most of them were scholarly and complete, but none did what this book did, and that is actually get my problems solved. The term “Quickstart” is acurate, the book dove right in to building forms and processing them with Perl and I have made more progress with this one book than I have with the other 3 combined. I would buy any book written by this author.