PERL CGI Tutorial
for Writing Interactive Form Scripts
The Future of Interactive Websites
The information in this part of our website should be considered outdated for the purposes of creating interactive websites. It might be interesting to know how we once provided a way for our website visitors to communicate with us, but the future of interactive websites is CMS.
We held off on recommending CMS for years because the technology was in its infant development stages. It was hard to install, hard to learn, hard to use, poorly documented and just not a good choice for first time website authors. That has changed in the last couple of years.
Today, CMS is provided at no extra charge by most web hosts. It can be installed automatically. The one we recommend, Joomla!, is well documented and fairly easy to learn. For more on CMS Click Here
Getting Started in CGI
This tutorial will use a little different approach to teaching CGI. We'll won't bore you with information about what CGI is or whether it's a programming language or not. You can get that everywhere else. We'll provide you with blocks of code called CGI scripts that you can cut and paste together to create larger scripts. If you want the technical information you should check out the other guys.
Before you can even start you must have a localhost server set up on your PC, and have PERL installed. You can do all this by visiting our PHP Tutorial
for instructions about getting the Apache server for Windows.
This CGI tutorial will teach you to build and execute CGI scripts in a Windows environment. The tutorial is designed to be used with the Apache server for Windows. If you haven't installed it yet you must do so before you can execute CGI scripts on your PC for testing purposes.
We will be creating scripts using Perl which is only one of several tools used to develop interactive websites..
This tutorial will not be an exhaustive study of Perl, but rather an introduction to basic techniques of the language as they relate to CGI.
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