June 2000
Intermediate to advanced
470 pages
14h 14m
English
Content preview from CGI Programming with Perl, 2nd EditionBecome 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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Chapter 7. JavaScript
Looking at the title of this chapter, you probably said to yourself, “JavaScript? What does that have to do with CGI programming or Perl?” It’s true that JavaScript is not Perl, and it cannot be used to write CGI scripts.[9] However, in order to develop powerful web applications we need to learn much more than CGI itself. Therefore, our discussion has already covered HTTP and HTML forms and will later cover email and SQL. JavaScript is yet another tool that, although not fundamental to creating CGI scripts, can help us create better web applications.
In this chapter, we will focus on three specific applications of JavaScript: validating user input in forms; generating semiautonomous clients; and bookmarklets. As we will soon see, all three of these examples use JavaScript on the client side but still rely on CGI scripts on the server side.
This chapter is not intended to be an introduction to JavaScript. Since many web developers learn HTML and JavaScript before turning to Perl and CGI, we will assume you’ve had some exposure to JavaScript already. If you haven’t, or if you are interested in learning more, you may wish to refer to JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan (O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.).
Background
Before we get started, let’s discuss the background of JavaScript. As we said, we’ll skip the introduction to JavaScript programming, but we should clear up possible confusions about what we mean when we refer to JavaScript and how JavaScript ...
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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.
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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.