I couldn't agree more. Sadly, I did the same thing as Ovid, since I was handed a website and told to fix it up in 3 days. I picked up Castro's book since it was the thinnest one on the shelf containing both "CGI" and "Perl" in the title. The first drafts of all my scripts used her hacked-together CGI routines... badly. Some months later (after having read the ORA books on Perl and CGI), I went back to those scripts and laughed myself silly. I rewrote the site using DBI and CGI.pm in a fraction of the time and space it had originally taken me. I don't think that introducing Perl and CGI concurrently is necessarily a bad idea, but doing it in a book that's only 272 pages cover to cover is insane. Newbies beware: this book is full of bad habits and lacks critical information. Experienced PHs won't have any use for it at all. I'll echo Ovid's summary: don't bother.

In reply to RE: Book Review - Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web by athomason
in thread Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web by Ovid

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