Day 16. Using Perl for CGI Scripting

In recent years one of the most common uses of Perl has been for creating CGI scripts. CGI, short for the Common Gateway Interface, refers to programs and scripts that live on a Web server and run in response to input from a browser—form submissions, complex links, some image maps—just about anything that isn't a plain ordinary file involves some sort of CGI script.

Because of Perl's popularity as a CGI language, I would be remiss if I did not give you a short introduction to CGI using Perl. Today we'll use what you already know about Perl in the context of creating CGI scripts on the Web. Today, you'll learn

• Some notes about CGI, before we start

• How the CGI process works, from browser to server and back again

• Creating a short CGI script, from start to finish

• An introduction to the CGI.pm module

• Working with data from HTML forms

• Printing the output

• Debugging the script