Perl & CGI Tutorial

Caveat Emptor This is really old stuff. I wrote this about 2 years ago, and even then under extreme time pressure. It is certainly usefull, but the web landscape (webscape if you will) has changed dramatically. Back then, most users were academic and used Unix workstations. Wow. Now the examples are highly esoteric and teasing out the informative bits is difficult.

Here comes the "best of intentions" statement. I'm working on updating this tutorial in many ways. First, Perl 5 will be used instead of 4.whatever. With this comes different sets of libraries and different technical issues. Also, the uses of Perl for CGI will be updated. No one is particularly interested in exporting X-displays anymore. Java and other technologies now do a much better job.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  
  • What is Perl?
    What is this CGI thing?
    

  Perl basics

  • How to run a perl program.
    Where to really learn about Perl.
    

  Perl & CGI

  • The command-line interface.
    The stdin interface.
    The environment interface.
    The stdout interface.
    

  Appendix A -- Index of examples
  Appendix B -- Other Perl & CGI resources