Resources for Perl and CGI Programmers

Perl Web Sites

• Get your Win32 Perl interpreter here.
• It's maintained by the folks at ActiveState.
• The Perl Institute, maintained by, among others, Larry Wall, Perl's inventor
• Tom Christiansen's Perl site including The Perl Language Home Page and various items of interest such as articles on Perl 5 recursive data structures
• Usenix's Perl Practicum consisting of a series of articles "...intended to demystify some of the more occult aspects of Perl programming."
• Emmie Lewis' about.com Perl guide , especially valuable for novices. Lots of example solutions to common tasks.

Books and Magazines

• An excellent Perl bibliography
• The Perl Journal -- printed on paper (!) Articles of great interest in every issue. Highly recommended.
• Lincoln Stein, Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm, The Standard for Building Web Scripts, Wiley Computer Publishing, New York (1998) ISBN 0-471-24744-8 -- and its companion website
• CGI.pm - a Perl5 CGI Library -- another Lincoln Stein website (at MIT)
• Lincoln Stein, How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site, Addison-Wesley (1997) ISBN 0-201-63462-7 (description)

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

• General Information on CGI

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)

• CPAN itself
• A CPAN site
• Another CPAN site
• A CPAN Mirror Site
• Another CPAN Mirror
• Yet another CPAN Site
• Invaluable collections of Perl programs and libraries
• Source code for the Perl interpreter itself for various machine architectures
• Index of scripts available for free download, arranged by category and also alphabetically by script name.
• Want to share your own scripts with the community? Here's how to format them, and here's how to upload them. The Perl world thanks you!

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• The Perl FAQ
• Tom Boutell's FAQ about the WWW -- how it works, browsers, servers, images, scripts, etc.
• Another FAQ with general CGI questions (not Perl-specific)
• An index of FAQs specifically on Perl CGI

Conferences

• O'Reilly organizes several Perl-related conferences. O'Reilly is generally accepted as the commercial center of the Perl world. They support the open-source movement. And Larry Wall is on their payroll!
• UniForum -- One of the most respected technical organizations in the industry. Conferences and workshops include Perl, Linux, and related topics.

Win32 Perl

• Cygwin32 -- a complete Unix emulation library, a suite of Unix-like tools, and ports of the GNU development tools (gcc, ld, ar, etc.)
• Mingw32 -- The Minimalist GNU Win32 package -- Cygwin32 without all the Unix stuff
• EGCS -- a faster and more reliable replacement for GNU's gcc

Databases and Related Modules

• DBI Home Page
• MySQL Home Page (for both Unix and Win32)
• MySQL Documentation
• Oracle
• Informix
• Sybase
• The Perl/Apache Project, including mod_perl, a version of perl embedded inside a Web server that greatly reduces startup time for CGI scripts written in Perl

HTML and Style Sheets

• The best HTML on-line reference we've seen.
• A style sheets on-line reference

Security

• A good collection of pointers to discussions about CGI security.
• A good description of potential security holes in several widely used CGI packages.
• A FAQ on WWW security in general

Newsgroups

• Announcements
• Miscellanea
• Modules
• CGI Authoring

Mailing Lists

• Sign up here for the three public mailing lists relating to the Perl DBI:
  • dbi-announce
  • dbi-users
  • dbi-dev

• The San Francisco Perl Mongers

• The Silicon Valley Perl Mongers