I believe he's trying to do both.

Coming from an area where it's common to plug-n-chug equations without knowing what's behind them, I firmly believe that it's important to try to teach someone the basics as how something works or operates, even if they probably will never actually get at that level. This article is a good example; before you go out and "use CGI.pm", it's a very good idea to know how the CGI mechanism works with the browser, how form data is sent back and forth, how cookies work, etc. CGI.pm allows you to ignore most of those details, but it's rather easy to spot those programmers that use CGI.pm but don't understand CGI (eg double header()'s).

In the case of this article, I think he's trying to teach the concept of CGI and HTTP, and possibly showing some of the security features that are needed with perl. This is fine, but I would expect that if this were a continued multipart series, the next installment would introduce CGI.pm, saying "now that you see the complexities behind the CGI request, let's see how to simplify it in perl...". If he doesn't do that, then yes, he's doing a disservice in as much as Matt's Script Archive is to the novice perl programmer.

But again, back to my first point, if he simply jumped in to CGI.pm, without an explation of what CGI is , or without having a prerequisite to this article that knowing how CGI/HTTP works is necessary, then it would also be a bad article. Knowing CGI.pm without knowing CGI is just trouble waiting to happen.

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

In reply to Re: Linux.com and CGI by Masem
in thread Linux.com and CGI by toadi

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