Title:CGI Programming on the World Wide Web
Author:Shishir Gundavaram
Publisher:O'Reilly & Associates
Pages:450
Price:US $32.95, Can. ~$46.95 (soft-bound)
ISBN:1-56592-168-2
Audience:CGI programmers
Rating:A+

A year ago, the author was contacting people whose opinions he respected, seeking advice on writing the perfect book. he then turned around and wrote one.

While not a UNIX book, per se, the examples were primarily developed in a UNIX environment. (The author took pains to make things portable, and his screens shots are definitely from an "alien" environment.)

Beyond the thorough and clear coverage of all aspects of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), the author develops useful CGI applications such as a calendar manager and fun toys such as a Concentration game. (Both come complete with output for graphics or text based browsers.) He also develops or introduces some handy libraries, such as Thomas Boutell's gd (a graphics library) and the author's own Sprite (a perl5 module allowing SQL querying of flat text databases).

I prefer Shishir's man page gateway to the others I've seen, and his sample server usage monitoring application is quite useful.

This one could have been called _CGI - the Definitive Guide_ and I would have agreed.

This is one of the Top 5 UNIX books of 1996.


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Copyright 1998 Miles O'Neal, Austin, TX. All rights reserved.