When I first saw that I was shocked and dismayed.

Then I thought about it.

The problem is fundamental. One of the great shortcomings of a CGI environment is that there is not a great standardized error reporting scheme. If you die, that only gives an informative message if you have CGI::Carp or some equivalent installed. Is it the place of CGI.pm to discuss where to find your error logs? Another solution is centralized error reporting, but that is a site decision.

Without a standardized way to display meaningful errors, there is no good way to trap them. And CGI.pm cannot assume a good standardized way to display them. Hence there is a catch-22.

What I think is a good solution is to somewhere have a good online tutorial and then have CGI.pm point out the issue and direct people to that tutorial. Said tutorial will need to discuss options for error reporting and decide on one very early. Then use it consistently.

The books, OTOH, have no excuse. A book is a format which (like a tutorial) can cover error reporting early, settle on an option, then use it consistently in the examples.