[NBLUG/talk] CGI programming memory lapse

[Walter Hansen]

> About five years ago, I knew how to write CGI web applications using
> Perl.  Last week, I found reason to write another such application.
> Unfortunately, five years of inactivity* can lead to a surprising loss
> of skill!
>
> Specifically, while I'm having little difficulty getting Perl scripts to
> compile and run, or getting MySQL to behave the way I expect, I cannot
> seem to remember how to make Perl scripts read the data submitted to
> them via HTML forms (as per the <form> tag).  And I no longer seem to
> have a copy of _CGI Programming with Perl_!
>
> Since it will take me at least a few days to replace my copy of the
> book, and I can't seem to make any sense of the pages I get when I
> search Google for "Perl CGI" (without quotation marks), would someone
> mind refreshing my memory as to how to read input from an HTML form?
>
>
> * This is not to say I haven't done ANY programming in the last 5 years;
> only that I haven't done any CGI programming in the last 5 years.
>
>
> --
> Lincoln Peters
> <sampln at sbcglobal.net>


Looks like you're getting good advice, but I'd probably just take a php
crash course for web apps. The code will be a lot nicer. It's also very,
very similar to perl, but it's built to just do web stuff, so 90% of what
you need is generally built right in. I was able to adapt from perl to php
in hours. I think they even have a crash course on the php (google php)
website. I love perl, but for web stuff php is faster/better.