MySQL and Perl for the Web

Using Email from Within Applications

When I began to outline which applications to discuss in this book, I considered whether to include a guestbook that visitors to your site can “sign” by filling in a form. A guestbook is simple, so it makes a good introductory form-based application that you can write without a lot of work. Also, you can store the comments in a database, which gives it some relevance to MySQL. But guestbooks have been covered in so many books on Web programming that they’ve become standard fodder, and my initial gut reaction to writing about them was “ugh.”

What to do? I went back and forth from one horn of this dilemma to the other several times. Eventually, I decided to include a guestbook application (right here, in fact), ...