Teach Yourself - CGI Programming in a Week

Because successful Web-site development often straddles multiple standards, tools, and programming languages, it's hard for books on the subject to deliver everything beginners need to get started. This problem often occurs with books on Common Gateway Interface (CGI) development; however, Rafe Colburn's Teach Yourself CGI Programming in a Week does a fine job of providing all the required basics for creating your own CGI scripts.

Written with Unix in mind, the book is careful to show that CGI runs on all of today's server platforms. Early chapters include simple tutorials on HTML and HTTP and show how to invoke CGI scripts. These chapters also consider various languages for CGI development, from industry-standard Perl to C/C++. From there the author moves to the basics of parsing CGI environment variables and building Web-page content dynamically, with discussions on how to use server-side includes and even dynamic graphics.

The author consistently adopts a practical, real-world approach to showing the best of CGI and demonstrating other tools that help CGI work. (His short demonstration on how to use JavaScript to validate user input on the client and leave real processing to server-side CGI is one example of this approach.) In addition, this tutorial is a compendium of the author's helpful hints on CGI security and how to use CGI effectively to create better Web sites. All Webmasters should read his guide to providing custom error pages for broken links.

Later chapters show how to use CGI with databases, which the author admits is not a particularly strong suit of CGI.(The tutorial on the basics of SQL is as good as any.) He surveys the growing field of alternatives to CGI, including active server pages (ASPs), Java Servlets, and NSAPI/ISAPI. The book closes with a listing of Perl basics, from language syntax to regular expressions, making this book a complete tutorial for getting started with the powerful capabilities of CGI.