March 1996
Intermediate to advanced
450 pages
10h
English
Content preview from CGI Programming on the World Wide WebBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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1. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
1.1 What Is CGI?
As you traverse the vast frontier of the World Wide Web, you will come across documents that make you wonder, “How did they do this?” These documents could consist of, among other things, forms that ask for feedback or registration information, imagemaps that allow you to click on various parts of the image, counters that display the number of users that accessed the document, and utilities that allow you to search databases for particular information. In most cases, you'll find that these effects were achieved using the Common Gateway Interface, commonly known as CGI.
One of the Internet's worst-kept secrets is that CGI is astoundingly simple. That is, it's trivial in design, and anyone with an iota of programming experience can write rudimentary scripts that work. It's only when your needs are more demanding that you have to master the more complex workings of the Web. In a way, CGI is easy the same way cooking is easy: anyone can toast a muffin or poach an egg. It's only when you want a Hollandaise sauce that things start to get complicated.
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 ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.