Hi O'Reilly,

First of all, I would like to say your books are great! I love the "In a Nutshell" references.

I have always enjoyed programming as a hobby and am very proficient in C++ and Java. I recently got a job as a Web developer and took on a project. It was the first "big" Web site I've done and it required database programming. I created the site and finished it using ASP/VBScript. It works well, but I really don't like writing VBScript and I am going to switch over to Unix hosting for another project I'll be working on. I would like to use CGI/Perl scripts to access databases. I already have a good knowledge of programming concepts and I know quite a few languages, but I've never written or attempted to learn Perl. Any recommendations for learning Perl and CGI scripts? Any reply would be greatly appreciated.

Scott

Scott,

I'm the author of a new O'Reilly book called Perl for Web Site Management, which I think you might find useful. It was written primarily for non-programmers, so you will probably find some of the coverage of basic programming concepts to be unnecessary, but I think the rest of the book will be right up your alley. It offers a gentle introduction to using Perl to do CGI scripting and other sorts of back-end Web tasks in a Unix environment, covering things like processing the output of HTML forms, generating large sites from arbitrarily formatted source data, doing log-file analysis, and checking for broken links.

Once you've worked your way through my book (or right away, if the gentle-introduction approach is just too slow for you), I'd suggest you look at the following:

• Learning Perl
• CGI Programming with Perl
• Perl Cookbook

All of those are excellent books that played a big part in my own Perl education. Another good resource for you, in particular, would be Programming the Perl DBI, which goes into lots of detail on doing database programming with Perl.

Good luck!

John Callender

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