Hello and greetings,
I've been working in the kitchen and listening silently for some time now, but with the permission of the wise ones, I would like to break my vow of silence...

I am inexperienced with Perl, but circumstances have lead me to it and I dig it. Coming from a web design background, the desire and need to create web applications has me squirrming in my chair. I've read and studied "learning Perl", "CGI Programming 101", and am looking at CGI Programming with Perl-2nd ed.". All of these books take me to the CGI.pm as a well used tool by many experienced coders.

What of the talk of "too big", "too slow", and why does Mr. Stien include at the end of the file the text,

"This module has grown large and monolithic. Furthermore it's doing many things, such as handling URLs, parsing CGI input, writing HTML, etc., that are also done in the LWP modules. It should be discarded in favor of the CGI::* modules, but somehow I continue to work on it."
What exactly does this mean?
Is it worth spending time learning about it?
Should one bag the CGI.pm for another, smaller faster module?

If so, what would that be. CGI-LIB seems to get pounded in the newsgroups.

I really want to get very good at this but I need to spend my time efficiently.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.
I'll get back to my potato pealing...

Donzo

PS: I thought I would also add: my company has to deploy it's software on Linux, Solaris and NT(2000) boxes. So Perl/CGI has been the choice, also why I looked into Php. Does mod_perl run on NT(2000)? I guess I am asking about CGI.pm both for my current situation and for future use, dictated mostly by Perl wisdom. Thanks

07/13/01 To all responders:

Thank you!

In reply to CGI.pm: what of it? by Donzo

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