CGI Programming: Amazon.co.uk: Thomas Boutell: Books

Product Description

The simple, static hypertext documents that currently dominate the Web canconvey a great deal of information, but eventually their limitations becomeclear. What if you wish to provide dynamic data--information that changes overtime? What if you want to sell products on your Web site and secure paymentinformation from users? Or what if you seek to provide a search facility thatpermits a Web database to be explored? Dynamic resources of this sort areaccomplished through CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming. CGI programs can take advantage of any resource available to the servercomputer to generate their output and can also accept input from the userthrough forms. These two basic capabilities have led to a wide variety ofapplications, such as forms processing, generation of inline images and movies,the formatting of data sets based on queries to a database, real-time updatesto Web pages, and more. CGI Programming in C and Perl shows you how to create theseinteractive, multimedia documents via CGI programming in two practicallanguages: C, which has distinct performance advantages, and Perl, one of themost popular for CGI today.Applications and source code are presented in both languages. You'll learn how to: *generate HTML pages and images on the fly *get CGI access on your ISP's site *ensure security for your CGI-activated site *parse form submissions directly *send e-mail via forms and CGI. 0201422190B04062001

From the Back Cover

CGI programs can take advantage of any resource available to the servercomputer to generate their output and can also accept input from the userthrough forms. These two basic capabilities have led to a wide variety ofapplications, such as forms processing, generation of inline images and movies,the formatting of data sets based on queries to a database, real-time updatesto Web pages, and more.

CGI Programming in C and Perl shows you how to create theseinteractive, multimedia documents via CGI programming in two practicallanguages: C, which has distinct performance advantages, and Perl, one of themost popular for CGI today. Applications and source code are presented in both languages.

You'll learn how to:

generate HTML pages and images on the fly
get CGI access on your ISP's site
ensure security for your CGI-activated site
parse form submissions directly
send e-mail via forms and CGI.

0201422190B04062001

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

No Nonsense 8 Feb 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

The title makes it clear C and perl a required. This is a great no nonsense book and people should not expect it to teach C, Perl AND CGI. Much better than all my wasted time with QUE publications. A new edition would be appreciated!

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a little out of date, but pretty good 7 April 1999

I'd written many complex CGI scripts using Perl before even buying this book, and the concepts in it are sound and well explained. My purpose for this book was to make the difficult transition from PERL-based CGI programming to C-based CGI, and this book definitely served the purpose well. My only two complaints are: 1) There aren't enough code examples per chapter (remember what I bought the book for), and 2) The material is woefully out of date. Still, I haven't seen anything better at CGI using C out there, and I've been looking for a long time.

This book needs to stop being reprinted 29 Mar 1999

The basic information and concepts are good but...

This book is seemingly out of date. It keeps referring to Netscape 1 for goodness sakes! The example pictures make it clear how outdated this book is. In such a fast changing environment, looking at these examples was a big turn off!

But I suppose the information is not completely outdated. There's not much to CGI, so I guess it doesn't really change. Still there are better books out there