Geek Pit

Perl beginners might be tempted by online books like this, simply because they are readily available. In this case, I would not recommend this book even after just skimming the online chapters. One of the biggest things that jumped out at me was the chapter on CGI form processing - using hand-rolled variable processing and no taint-checking are big no-no’s. What explained this was the book’s copyright - 1996 - a lot has happened in Perl in the past ten years, including CGI.pm, and many fine templating systems.

A much better and more recent (2000) online Perl book is Beginning Perl. For simple CGI, Ovid’s Perl CGI course is excellent. Beginners to Perl should also check out learn.perl.org and the perlmonks.org tutorials, in particular the Getting Started With Perl Section.

Technorati Tags: Perl,Howto,Learning