Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course

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:

After many comments about my 'fascinating' use of color, I have chosen a new color scheme (praise the dogs for CSS!).
Many (ugh) typos have been corrected.
Greatly improved site navigation.
Much of the HTML has been cleaned up.
The appendices have been expanded and a 'downloads' section has been included.
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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Comment on Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course

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Re: Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course by legLess (Hermit) on Jun 19, 2001 at 21:01 UTC
Thanks, Ovid. Personally, I liked the old colors ;) Question. You say: I've heard many arguments regarding whether or not one should use CGI.pm's HTML generating functions. When building large, Web-based applications, they are innapropriate. This makes sense to me - for a large (or even medium) application, the HTML generation will obscure the code. What's the preferred alternative? `HTML::Template`? `CGI::Application`? I've played with these a bit and read the docs, but haven't used either in production. -- man with no legs, inc.	[reply]
(Ovid) Re(2): Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jun 19, 2001 at 21:17 UTC
legLess asked: What's the preferred alternative [to embedded HTML or HTML shortcuts]? As one might expect, there is no preferred alternative. I use Template Toolkit at work. That, combined with stuffing most of my database work into objects has made my actual coding so ridiculously easy that it's not even funny. HTML::Template is a nice, lightweight templating system, but it's not as robust as the Toolkit. I've glanced at CGI::Application, but it basically appears to be a glorified substitution for if/then statements. Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply]
Re: Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course by Chady (Priest) on Jun 19, 2001 at 11:31 UTC
Now that's what I call good use of colors... He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life. Chady \| http://chady.net/	[reply]
Re: Lesson Four, Part 1 of online CGI course by Anonymous Monk on Jun 21, 2001 at 03:16 UTC
Thanks for the great tutorial ovid. It's very well written and enjoyable. I've just finished reading lesson 1, and made me think of something I've been wonderind for ages. In "CGI programming with Perl", does the book mainly deal with the structured ('normal') or object orientated approach? I'm hoping it does the latter. Hope you don't mind me asking this, but I haven't had a chance to get my paws on the book yet. Again, thanks for the tutorial. I'll be reading the rest now. :-) Mark	[reply]