Re: looking for a good tutorial

A little disambiguation is needed:

Are you asking how to accept data through a web form (CGI) or how to scrape the data from a webpage (spidering / screen scraping)?

After the data-gathering stage, do you need help learning how to use DBI?

For the first part, if you're trying to write a CGI script, use the CGI module. Its documentation will give you a start. I also really recommend the second edition of the O'Reilly mouse book: CGI Programming with Perl. You'll get through it in two or three days (maybe faster), and it will go a long way toward getting you going. Ovid's CGI tutorial is also helpful: http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course.

On the other hand, if you are screen scraping and want to dump that into a database, I recommend the WWW::Mechanize module. Read its documentation, and you should be 99% ready to get started.

For the next step, you need the DBI module, along with a DBD module that targets your particular database. You can try to start by reading the DBI documentation, though I found it almost necessary to read the O'Reilly book "Programming the Perl DBI". I also found my SQL skills lacking, and had to do a fair amount of reading in that regard too.

Hope this helps...

Dave

Comment on Re: looking for a good tutorial

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: looking for a good tutorial by Thargor (Scribe) on Feb 23, 2005 at 18:14 UTC
Sorry if it was a little vague. I am going to need to be able to take 3 variables from a db and display them on the web 2 as drop downs and 1 as just plain text. From the web I will need to be able to take 2 varibles from text that someone has writen and store them along with a selection they made back into the same db. does that clear it up at all?	[reply]
Re^3: looking for a good tutorial by davido (Cardinal) on Feb 23, 2005 at 18:23 UTC
It clears things up a bit. You want to follow portion of my previous reply that discusses CGI, and the portion that discusses DBI. Basically the param() method of CGI will allow you to pull info from a web form. And DBI facilitates interfacing with your database in a fairly uniform way. You'll connect to the database, prepare a query, execute the query, and print the results as part of the webpage. Upon receiving information from the webpage, you'll prepare an insert, execute the insert, and probably print a confirmation screen. Be sure to do the required reading mentioned above, and feel free to ask any specific questions where you need additional clarification. Dave	[reply]