I substantially agree with Masem. Especially in realms such as the Web, it's important to know what you are doing, and what happens behind the scenes.

Even more so using our beloved language, because Perl gives you enough rope to hang yourself.

I hope that the author has an article ready on CGI.pm though, which can be really well understood at this point (and some HTML knowledge isn't bad at all).

Don't get me wrong, it's great to be able to use a language supported by such a precious community, and CPAN is by no means an astounding result.

But I think that especially learners can benefit from seeing and implementing from the grounds up. It really helps in getting the big picture sorted.

After all, we don't like the Perl programmers community to turn into a Component Assemblers community as happened with another well known prototyp... err programming language, do we? :-)

Very unlikely to happen with Perl anyway, because we have access to the source code of so many, so well written modules, we can contribute and improve them, we can make the World a better place... but for this to happen, it is important (at least, in my opinion) that programmers are introduced to the joy of modules as well as what's behind them.

There are for sure people who are not interested in the gory details and just want to use a ready made module. That's what they are for, and it's perfectly reasonable. As long as you know what yuo are doing, which is certainly not the case if you're a Perl beginner writing CGIs :-)

To summarize, I support the author's choice of explaining the CGI and Perl the way he did. I found the article well written and informative, and I also hope he'll talk about the natural next step which is of course CGI.pm.

-- TMTOWTDI