Product Description
Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional introduces you to the world of Perl Internet application development. This book tackles all areas crucial to developing your first web applications and includes a powerful combination of real-world examples coupled with advice. Topics range from serving and consuming RSS feeds, to monitoring Internet servers, to interfacing with e-mail. You’ll learn how to use Perl with ancillary packages like Mason and Nagios.
Though not version specific, this book is an ideal read if you have had some grounding in Perl basics and now want to move into the world of web application development. Author Steve Suehring emphasizes the security implications of Perl, drawing on years of experience teaching readers how to “think safe,” avoid common pitfalls, and produce well-planned, secure code.
Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional
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Perl and the Internet, especially the web, are nothing new. CGI programming and Perl were part of the early wild, wild west days of the World Wide Web. However, Perl is more than just a CGI processor relegated to handling simple email forms and other mundane web tasks. In this book the author will take you through several examples and topics dealing with using Perl for database development, XML and RSS feeds, performance monitoring of your web server, and advanced CGI tasks such as how to handle uploaded files on the web with Perl, and much more.
Each section goes over a concept, introduces the module you will be using to accomplish the task, shows you the source code and walk you through it. In addition, tips as well as things to avoid are listed throughout each example for things to watch out for, or for common programming pitfalls to avoid with Perl. Sections themselves are broken down into topics that group concepts such as separate topics on XML and RSS feeds, CGI, Performance Monitoring and Web Templates.
This is a good book for the Perl programmer with some skills beneath his or her belt. It helps you take the simple Perl you may be using on your website today and help develop it to use all the power and functionality of Perl.
Rating: 5 / 5
My warning with “Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional” is to understand what author Steve Suehring means by the word “novice.” He does not mean it as a synonym for “beginner”. If you don’t have some degree of skill in Perl, you will be overwhelmed.
That being said, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has worked through a beginning Perl book, or several. (I’ve found that the best way to learn any computer language is to work through several introductory books, getting most of the examples to work on my computer.) Do like I did and read through the appendix, “Perl Basics,” first. I’ll admit I learned a few things, and I’d bet that you will, too. This appendix is worth the price of the book.
I don’t think that anyone will become an expert (or professional) in the areas Suehring covers by reading this book. However, this is an excellent book for seeing what is out there and getting your feet wet. His section on databases led me to read a book on SQL, and I’m about halfway through another. I’m grateful for his push in that direction!
Next for me will probably be a book on LWP, a Perl module to automate web surfing. Suehring gave me a start, but I need more.
I already had some background in CGI using Perl. I enjoyed the review, though. CGI, Common Gateway Interface, is a way to go beyond HTML. For instance, I use it to read and write files on my website in response to user input.
I don’t at this time have a great deal of interest in Net::Tools, that is such skills as sending e-mail from web-sites and pinging them. Nor do I see myself studying XML and RSS, Perl templates and Mason, or learning about the Apache server. However, I’m glad I read through the whole book to get an idea of what is involved.
I should include a comment that “Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional” is a bit Unix-centric, like so many Perl books. I should also share that the source-code on the web-site for the examples is all in .tar.gz format, rather than the .zip format we Windows users are accustomed to dealing with. So if you are a Windows user, plan to do a lot of typing. Or to figure out that .tar.gz thing.
Read the whole book, appendix first. (Either now, or when you have a couple Perl tutorials under your belt.) My guess is “Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional” will lead you to find a new area of interest or two, too, and probably different ones from mine.
Rating: 4 / 5
The focus of this book is on interacting with the Internet using Perl. It assumes some very basic knowledge of programming such as the concepts of scalar variables, arrays, if/then/else, and similar items. If you are not familiar with these items in a Perl environment then it is still all covered pretty well in the Appendix. The first section of the book contains information on working with CGI modules, databases, and interacting with the operating system for directory information, file uploads, etc. The second section discusses working with the LWP and Net::Tools. The LWP is the Library of WWW modules in Perl. This collection of modules allows you to write Perl programs that include the most common web tasks built in including retrieving web pages and submitting web-based forms. While the LWP supports various web protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and NNTP the book concentrates primarily on using the LWP with HTTP and HTTPS. The NET::Tools primarily look at working with POP3 and SMTP services. The third section of the book is about using Perl with XML, SOAP, and RSS. The following section focuses on using mod_perl to enhance performance. As a module embedded in the Apache server this allows Perl to execute faster and allows the Perl programs to access the Apache request object. The fifth and final section focuses on working with templates, and building perl based web sites with Mason. Mason is used to insert Perl code directly into an HTML page. This in turn allows for a dynamic web site with elements common to all pages but still allowing some changes based on the page being accessed. Beginning Perl Web Development is highly recommended to anyone who wants to use Perl for added functionality with your web site or to allow interaction with other web sites.
Rating: 5 / 5