Learn to Use CGI in Two Hours
By Steve Humphrey
Learn to Use CGI in Two Hours – I’ve been using the Internet since 1993. I opened my first Web site in 1998. I’ve taught myself HTML, CGI, Perl and SQL. I am *not* an expert by any means.
However, I have written Perl scripts to solve problems for myself, my clients and my friends. I hope that much of what I’ve learned will help you to master the art of writing, installing, and using CGI scripts more easily (and faster) than I did.
Purpose of this book
This book is intended to teach you how to obtain (or write) and install CGI scripts written in Perl or other programming languages. The focus is mainly on scripting in Perl, but the installation process is very much the same for CGI scripts written in any other language.
By providing you with some complete scripts, some subroutines and the tools for combining them in new ways, I hope to teach you a “mix−and−match” approach to solving scripting tasks. I believe that if you follow the principles taught here, you can install CGI scripts on your Web server/site in a very short time.
Friends, this is not rocket science! It’s simply a skill you have not yet acquired. There was a time (come on…admit it) when you didn’t even know how to “surf the Web”. You mastered that easily enough, didn’t you? You can pick this up almost as easily. Once you’ve got it, you’ll see that it really wasn’t all that hard.
What you will learn
First, you will learn what CGI is, what a script is and how it works. Then, you will learn about subroutines and how they can be re−used to save lots of time and effort. You’ll discover where to find free CGI scripts and how to get them. You’ll find out how to take a useful subroutine from one script and use it in another script.