New Scripts | CGI & Perl | Tutorials & Tips

This Part 5 of the Perl 101 series introduces you to subroutines and teaches you how to structure your code for maximum reusability. Also included: return values, my() and local() constructs, and a marriage proposal.

The part 3 of the Perl 101 series teaches you more about Perl's control structures - including the FOR and WHILE loops - and also introduces you to Perl's array variables.

Known as much for its confusing, often oddball, syntax as for its efficiency and speed, Perl has a mystique that very few languages can match. This first article in a new series gives novice and intermediate programmers an introduction to the basics of the language.

A Beginner's guide to PERL An introduction to PERL which shows users how to parse forms, and use arrays. The tutorial has been designed with comprehensive examples and step by step explanations.

The excerpt from Perl in a Nutshell (O'Reilly & Associates), provides an overview of mod_perl including how to install it on your machine, how to improve CGI performance using mod_perl, as well as a listing of the most commonly used mod_perl modules.

This tutorial explains how to use the Apache::Registry Perl module to improve the performance of your CGI scripts, as well as how to implement SSIs and <Perl> sections with mod_perl.

Here's how to get started using SQL and SQL-driven databases from Perl. Main topics include: General information about relational databases, About SQL, What DBI is For, Example of How to Use DBI, Cached Queries, and Transactions.

An introduction to the HTTP protocol used for the exchange of www documents. It covers the essential knowledge needed for the other articles in this section on web client programming.

This article is a complete tutorial showing how to create your own streaming web clients, that can be used to stream (play while downloading) multimedia files such as mp3.

Find out how to use sendmail (or other similar mail-serving software) to send e-mail from within your script. It presents a very simple program that emails a confirmation to a user that his/her request to subscribe to a newsletter has been accepted.

An introduction to the basic concepts of socket communications and a tutorial on how to build simple programs tha communicate via TCP/IP sockets. The tutorial is based on two example programs that exchange information.

This online tutorial guids through the steps to place a guestbook CGI onto your system. This tutorial deals with UNIX servers and UNIX commands for configuration, and assumes that you are able to Telnet into the system, Create directories, and Change directory modifications. Source codes for the guestbook script and sample HTML files are provided on the Web site.

This is a comprehensive tutorial on how to create your own image counter CGI on your Web page. Main topics include: Make the CGI Directory, Make A Directory for the Counter's Files, Altering the Script For Your Server, Find the Absolute Path, Turn on the CGI/COUNT Directories, Getting A Count On A Page, Locking Out Others, and more. Full source code is available.

This tutorial walks you through step-by-step how to create a simple poll CGI script on your Web site. It provides detailed instructions on how to install it on your server and how to configure the script. Full source code and necessary graphics are also presented.

Perl and MySQL can be used together.... so why can't Perl and mSQL be together as well? Well, they can... using the same Perl module as well. Check out what you can and can't do with it here.

Find out what those server response codes like 401, 404, 500 mean. It can help you troubleshoot minor problems - knowing these are a must if you'll be working on programs that run on a server.

This is a list of common mistakes that people make when writing Perl scripts and suggestions on how to fix them. Included are general help tips on how to debug - very important particularly for beginners at programming. This list is based on the author's personal experience and complaints found on newsgroups/message boards.

To increase the interactiving and ability of the script to "remember" things, we'll need to store some information in separate files. This tutorial shows you how Perl allows you to create, edit and delete files. Some additional, and useful, information on parsing your data is also included.

This tutorial alogn with a CGI script illustrates how to accept and parse (turns it into something readable and usable) the form data. This case study piece is heavily commented due to the ambiguous nature of the perl code.

This is an introduction to simple output in a perl script. The case study goes into greater detail with quotes and EOF markers and how metacharacters and escape sequences modify the output.