The Web Wizard's Guide to Perl and CGI

This book is thorough in its knowledge, easy to read, with good references, and very well outlined and organized. It takes the reader and aspiring PERL / CGI Programmer from scratch to the point where he or she will be fully capable of writing their own fully functional and interactive PERl-CGI based web site in a UNIX/LINUX/Windows platform in a matter of a couple of weeks. I covers all of the necessary topics such as parameters, functions, variables, lists and arrays, sub routines, forms, writing and reading to files, and much more. It also provides a solid foundation to jump into the more advanced topics in PERL and CGI programming. I am very pleased with this introduction to PERL and highly recomend this book to anyone who already knows html and other programming languages and would like to add PERL to their tools list. This is an academic treatment of PERL although not a scientific one.

I really liked this Introductory Perl book. It covers a lot of ground without assuming that the reader is a genius. This full color book has many features I liked such as call outs (kind of like arrow diagrams) on code sections, short code pieces with a line-by-line descriptions and things like tip and warning boxes. It covers things from starting your first CGI script to trickier things like regular expressions and using files on the web Server. An excellent starting book for people wanting to learn Perl or Perl scripting.

If you have absolutely no experience with perl and cgi, you'll probably appreciate this book. Assumes no prior knowledge and presents information in manageable, non-intimidating fashion.