Chapter 12. CGI Programming

Perl is the language behind many of the interactive web pages you see today. Whenever you enter data into a form or get information from an interactive report, you are probably dealing with Perl.

Interactive web pages use a programming API called CGI (Common Gateway Interface) to handle the interaction between the user and the application. Because of its excellent string handling capabilities, Perl is an ideal language for writing web applications.

This chapter shows you how the CGI system works and how to write simple CGI programs to power your web site.

This chapter is oriented toward a UNIX or Linux system because that’s what most web servers run on.