It's been quite a while since I've had time to work on my CGI course. Various problems like moving to Europe, moving back from Europe, and other miscellaneous issues (read: laziness), have prevented me from doing much work on it. However, I have recently uploaded the draft of Lesson 4, part 1 of the course. This is a small lesson as it's not required to understand CGI programming. It's mainly there to give programmers a rough idea of how to use CGI.pm's HTML generating functions. You don't have to use them to get through the rest of the course (ignoring for the moment that the rest of the course does not exist yet), but since I will frequently be using the functions and since they may be encountered "in the wild", it's useful to be familiar with them.

Lesson 4, part 2 will be taking the small page generated in part 1 and actually creating a small application that reads the data and does something with it. No guarantees as to when that will be up, but I'll start right away as parsing form data is the 'meat' that most people want to sink their programming teeth in.

In addition to the new lesson, you'll notice several changes:

  1. After many comments about my 'fascinating' use of color, I have chosen a new color scheme (praise the dogs for CSS!).
  2. Many (ugh) typos have been corrected.
  3. Greatly improved site navigation.
  4. Much of the HTML has been cleaned up.
  5. The appendices have been expanded and a 'downloads' section has been included.
  6. Added some clarification to the 'untainting' section of Lesson 3.

Many people have offered me excellent suggestions for the course and I have followed up on several of them. Some, for various reasons, have not been practical to follow-up on. Others are a Herculean effort that I do not have time for (such as creating an extensive glossary and hyper-linking terms in the course).

I am also creating a "acknowledgements" page. It's not complete and I felt it best to not publish it, yet, since I don't want to offend anyone who's been inadvertently left off. I'll get that up there someday, too :)

Let me know what you think. I love to hear about typos (sort of) and code errors. Any comment that you feel is worthwhile is welcome.

Cheers,
Ovid

Side note: Currently, the CGI Resource Index has my course rated at 9.81, which is the highest rating of any of their courses. I only have 18 votes and I don't expect that rating to last, but it's nice to know that it's appreciated.

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In reply to Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course by Ovid

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