Re: [MacPerl] How To Perl

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

At 11:09 -0500 6/23/1999, ken towry wrote:
>Christian,
>I sent the last two emails plain text, did that not straiten it up? If
>not I'm sorry! Please let me know, I don't want to be like Richard said
>a "Hell's Programmer".

I wasn't talking about you, I was referring to a font called "Hell's 
Programmer" that was displaying some of your messages in Eudora. I've 
since gotten rid of it.

>Richard,
>I hope this email explains what's going on. It seems to me that this
>script is a convoluted way of getting things done (very large and busy
>script) but, I just don't know any better, but trying.
>
>The reason I bought this 1000 page book is primarily because I wanted to
>be able to call/run scripts from within an HTML/DHTML document and
>replace a form within that document at will.
>I thought by studying this book, it would help me understand the
>principals involved so I could then write my own scripts to interact
>with my HTML/DHTML forms.
>I know graphic design very well. I know HTML/DHTML fair (2 years).
>I don't know Perl very well at all, although that's all I've been
>working on learning for the last 3 months. I could not build the fancy
>forms I want in Perl so I thought I might be able to call scripts from
>the html and then replace certain information within the html doc.
>My first Perl book didn't go into this at all. But I've seen it done.
>Am I going down the wrong road?
>I didn't think I would ever get into Perl, but I did, and it's very
>cool. I want to learn this, very much. I seem to have no other desire as
>strong, this is probably the Perl way.

I understand what you are trying to do and I think that the book you 
got just made it more confusing and overwhelming than it needs to be. 
Maybe you should start out by trying something simple and kind of 
work up to the trick stuff?

It might help if you bear in mind that all a cgi really does is print 
results to the browser using normal html and a lot of times there 
isn't any real reason for the script to open an existing html file 
and try to decipher the tags in it. The variable content may be based 
on the script's processing of the variables that it received from the 
original form that the user submitted and it is dynamic, but that's 
just based on the logic that you built into the script. You can 
construct tables or whatever on the fly and embed tags as the output 
is generated depending on what the results may be.

It seems to me that there are an awful lot of crappy Perl books 
floating around now. If you can find a copy of "Perl Cgi Programming 
: No Experience Required" it's not bad for getting past the "what the 
hell am I doing" stage. It's pretty limited, but readable and the 
code listings actually work. ;-]


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto:richard@richardgordon.net
http://www.richardgordon.net
770.971.6887 (voice)
770.216.1829 (fax)

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