CGI Programming in C & Perl

Featuring C and Perl 5 Source Code

By Thomas Boutell

Create Interactive, Dynamically Generated Web Pages With CGI Programming

Available for purchase online, via the Boutell.Com Technical Bookstore.

ISBN: 0-201-42219-0, paperback, 416 pages

List Price: $34.95 U.S.

The simple, static hypertext documents that currently dominate the Web can convey a great deal of information, but eventually their limitations become clear. What if you wish to provide dynamic data -- information that changes over time? What if you want to sell products on your Website and secure payment information from users? Or what if you seek to provide a search facility that permits a Web database to be explored? Dynamic resources of this sort are accomplished through CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming.

CGI programs can take advantage of any resource available to the server computer to generate their output and can also accept input from the user through forms. These two basic capabilities have led to a wide variety of applications, such as forms processing, generation of inline images and movies, the formatting of data sets based on queries to a database, real-time updates to Web pages, and more.

CGI Programming in C & Perl shows you how to create these interactive, multimedia documents via CGI programming in two practical languages: C, which has distinct performance advantages, and Perl, one of the most popular for CGI today. Applications and source code are presented in both languages in the book and on the CD-ROM (also available on the web).

You'll learn how to:

generate HTML pages and images on the fly
get CGI access on your ISP's site
ensure security for your CGI-activiated site
parse form submissions directly
send e-mail via forms and CGI.

The CD-ROM contains a complete range of CGI software libraries in both C and Perl, ready to plug into your Website: Thomas Boutell's cgic library, a complete CGI implementation in C; the gd dynamic graphics library for GIF generation in C; the popular Mapedit imagemap editing program; several Perl libraries; and all the source code and sample applications from the book. The contents of the CD-ROM are also available here on the web, via both HTTP and FTP. (Please try the HTTP link first.)

Thomas Boutell is the author of the World Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions list, a FAQ that is distributed to all Web-related newsgroups. He is also the author of the leading CGI library written in C, as well as the gd dynamic graphics library.

Published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.

A-W Developers Press