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CGI Programming on the World Wide Web By Shishir Gundavaram, 1st Edition March 1996. The Common Gateway Interface ( CGI ) emerged as the first way to present dynamically generated information on the World Wide Web. CGI allows the computer to generate Web pages instantly at the user's request rather than being written by someone in advance. CGI is the part of the Web server that can communicate with other programs running on the server. With CGI, the Web server can call up a program, while passing user-specific data to the program ( such as what host the user is connecting from, or input the user has supplied using HTML form syntax ). The program then processes that data and the server passes the program's response back to the Web browser. CGI isn't magic; it's just programming with some special types of input and a few strict rules on program output. Everything in between is just programming. Of course, there are special techniques that are particular to CGI, and that's what this book is mostly about. You can use whatever language you want, although certain languages are more suited for CGI programming than others. Perl is by far the most widely used language for CGI programming! It is highly portable and readily available. It contains extremely powerful string manipulation operators, as well as functions to deal with binary data. It contains very simple and concise constructs. It makes calling shell commands very easy, and provides some useful equivalents of certain UNIX system functions. There are numerous extensions built on top of Perl for specialized functions. Because of these overwhelming advantages, Perl is the language used for most of the examples throughout this book. The book also includes appendices with a Frequently Asked Questions list for Perl and CGI, a quick reference for regular expressions ( since many examples depend heavily on the use of regular expressions in Perl ), an overview of CGI::* modules for Perl 5 and an overview of the CGI Lite library.
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