What You Are Expected to Know Before Reading (CGI Programming with Perl)

0.2. What You Are Expected to Know Before Reading

You should already be comfortable with Perl. Although the first edition of CGI Programming on the World Wide Web discussed other programming languages, this edition of CGI Programming with Perl (as the new name implies) focuses exclusively on Perl. CGI supports a wide variety of programming languages, but Perl has certainly become the language of choice.

If you do not already know Perl, an excellent introduction is Learning Perl, Second Edition, by Randal Schwartz and Tom Christiansen (published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.). Once you understand the basics, we strongly recommend you get a copy of Programming Perl, Third Edition (affectionately known as The Camel Book) by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.). It is the standard reference used by Perl developers everywhere. Additional Perl resources are listed in Appendix A, "Works Cited and Further Reading".

We will discuss many modules from CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. If you have not downloaded and installed modules from CPAN before, refer to Appendix B, "Perl Modules".

You should also be familiar with perldoc, the standard tool for browsing Perl documentation. perldoc is useful for two reasons. First, it allows you to access the convenient and extensive documentation distributed with Perl. Second, it is essential for learning to use modules downloaded from CPAN. perldoc is also presented in Appendix B, "Perl Modules".