nithins has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

I am keen to learn web development framework using perl, and i am quite new to web development as well.I am planning to learn dancer as of now,could you suggest me how to go about this?

Before dancer, do i need to go learn CGI ?

  • Comment on How to go about web development using perl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: How to go about web development using perl
by kcott (Archbishop) on Jan 09, 2014 at 07:40 UTC

      Hi Ken,

      Do i need to go through CGI tutorial before i touch Dancer?

Re: How to go about web development using perl
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 09, 2014 at 08:20 UTC

    Before dancer, do i need to go learn CGI ?

    No, but as Dancer and CGI are just ways for computer programs to speak internet, you should learn about the internet :)

Re: How to go about web development using perl
by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Jan 09, 2014 at 09:23 UTC
    Before dancer, do i need to go learn CGI ?
    It might be worthwhile to take a look at CGI at some point to get a better understanding of what's going on under the hood, but, no, CGI knowledge is not required to use Dancer.

    It can be useful at times to help understand why certain things work the way they do, but it's not anything you need to know for working with Dancer on a day-to-day basis.

Re: How to go about web development using perl
by gri6507 (Deacon) on Jan 09, 2014 at 17:34 UTC
    I know you wanted to learn Dancer specifically. However, you may want to look at Mojolicious. It seems to be a very powerful, yet simple enough way to develop webapps.
Re: How to go about web development using perl
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Jan 09, 2014 at 16:39 UTC

    Frameworks, such as Dancer, are very useful for letting you focus more quickly upon what you want to do, but if you are starting absolutely from-scratch in your understanding of web development (as you seem to be ...), it is critical that you obtain a “big picture” contextual understanding of what is going on.   You do need to clearly understand how your web-browser interacts with a web server (both with AJAX and otherwise ...), how the CGI and FastCGI and mod_language work, and so on.   You do not need to know these things, initially, in great depth, but you do need to know how the various pieces of the puzzle [can... might... could...] work together.   This will become critical when (not “if” ...) something happens that you did not expect.   You won’t even know where to look, and so you will waste much time and hair-follicles ... avoidably.

    So ... take a step back from “Perl,” and/or Dancer or any particular tool, and get to know the neighborhood.   Walk around a little while, before you try to run.