CGITutorials

CGI Tutorials

1. CGI Programming 101
   CGI Programming 101 will show you how to add guestbooks, page counters, shopping carts and other interactive elements to your website. CGI programming is easy to learn; if you know HTML, you can learn CGI. You don't need any prior programming experience.
   You'll need a few things before you can start writing CGI Programs. You'll need a web server, for one. Chances are good that your current web host or ISP already supports CGI programs, but if you aren't sure, ask them. This book is geared towards Unix, but you can easily set up Apache and Perl on Mac and Windows.
     
2. CGI  for The Total Non-Programmer 
   This tutorial will walk you through the basics of creating CGIs with Perl on a Unix platform. Unlike other tutorials I've read, this does not assume you know anything about CGIs, Perl, or Unix.  At the end of this tutorial you will be able to create Perl programs for counting hits, storing and retrieving guestbook information, and processing secure passwords. You will also gain an understanding of how the Perl programming language works, and you will learn to use variables, IF statements, and loops in Perl. 
      
3. How CGI Script Works
   In this article, we will look at the art and science of Web pages and experiment with a number of techniques that you can try out on your own machine today. We've even created a tool that lets you try out HTML and view it instantly. As it turns out, Web page creation is both incredibly easy and a lot of fun, and totally within your reach. By the time you finish reading this article, you will be ready to start assembling your own. 
      
4. CGI Tutorial
   CGI is the Common Gateway Interface which allows you to create Web pages on the fly based on information from buttons, checkboxes, text input and so on. The pages can be images, sounds, text and indeed everything else transferable by the Web. They can even be references to other Web pages. In this tutorial we concentrate on creating HTML documents (rather than images and sounds) but the principles transfer readily to other formats. This should provide a good start to cope with the more comprehensive documentation elsewhere. For example, you should be able to find your way around the CGI programmer's reference with greater purpose, and perhaps some of the CGI material on Yahoo. 
       
5. The CGI Bin
   Face 2 Interface presents The CGI Bin, your place on the web for learning about Perl and CGI programming.  There are a total of five articles ranging from the simple to the complex, from counting scripts to cookies and administrative screens.  All rants, raves, and comments of any kind are most warmly welcomed. Face 2 Interface is dedicated to making the web work for you and your customers, by providing high quality solutions to your business needs.
      
6. A guide to HTML and CGI scripts 
   HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a markup language which consists of tags embedded in the text of a document. The browser reading the document interprets these markup tags to help format the document for subsequent display to a reader. However, many of the decisions about layout are made by the browser. Remember, web browsers are available for a wide variety of computer systems.  The browser thus displays the document with regard to features that the viewer selects either explicitly or implicitly.
     
7. The Most Simple Intro to CGI 
   This tutorial is not intended to be an indepth or a 100% technically correct treatise. It is an explanation in plain English by analogy of how HTML and CGI-BIN requests are handled. This is the first installment of a series. Oh, I swear that no animals were hurt in the making of this web page. The illustration above is a simple, but accurate representation of the Internet. We have rats out looking for food, which are our browsers. We have our garbage cans, better known as servers providing storage and a way of doling out the food when asked for it. So in a nutshell, the rat asks for food and the garbage can gives it to the rat. 
     
8. CGI Made Really Easy
   There's not much to it, despite any intimidating hype you might have heard. If you can read from STDIN and write to STDOUT, then you can write CGI scripts. If you're a programmer already, this primer can teach you the basics of CGI in a few minutes. If you're not a programmer, this primer won't help you much-- sorry. Learn some programming, even shell scripting, and come back when you're done. 
   This primer focuses on writing CGI scripts to process HTML forms on the Web. It skips some details, but can bring you up to speed fast (literally an hour or less), and covers 90% of real-world situations. When you feel the need, check out the full CGI spec. For help with writing HTML forms, see this tutorial fragment, or this documentation at NCSA. 
      
9. The Common Gateway Interface
   The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. A plain HTML document that the Web daemon retrieves is static, which means it exists in a constant state: a text file that doesn't change. A CGI program, on the other hand, is executed in real-time, so that it can output dynamic information. For example, let's say that you wanted to "hook up" your Unix database to the World Wide Web, to allow people from all over the world to query it. Basically, you need to create a CGI program that the Web daemon will execute to transmit information to the database engine, and receive the results back again and display them to the client. This is an example of a gateway, and this is where CGI, currently version 1.1, got its origins. 
     
10. CGI Script Installation Tutorial
    This article is to make your CGI-Installation work a lot easier. I have written it from my experience and I've tried to make this tutorial a guide for CGI/Perl script installation. You can learn everything you want to know about integrating your site with CGI scripts and hence about interactivity. You can skip some of the sections in the beginning, if you know the basics of CGI.  You should be familiar with technical jargon like FTP,Telnet,Unix and other Net terms before starting any script installation. If you are a beginner I recommend you read the beginners central from Northern web.
       
11. CGI City
    Here is small collection of our own CGI/Perl programming tips and tutorials. We have witten these with the novice in mind, so expect these to be as simple and as basic as possible. While we did write these materials with the beginner in mind, note that some basic knowledge of Perl programming is already assumed. Perl is perhaps the most widely used language for World Wide Web applications. Its core functionality was originally intended for parsing text-based data and generating results based on these data. It is now more commonly used for WWW applications such as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming and processing of data passed through web forms. While it may not compare directly with the new breeds of programming languages and object-oriented development tools, its use is never under-rated. This is perhaps because it has by far the easiest implementation. 
       
12. CGI Programming on the World Wide Web
    As you traverse the vast frontier of the World Wide Web, you will come across documents that make you wonder, "How did they do this?" These documents could consist of, among other things, forms that ask for feedback or registration information, imagemaps that allow you to click on various parts of the image, counters that display the number of users that accessed the document, and utilities that allow you to search databases for particular information. In most cases, you'll find that these effects were achieved using the Common Gateway Interface, commonly known as CGI. One of the Internet's worst-kept secrets is that CGI is astoundingly simple. That is, it's trivial in design, and anyone with an iota of programming experience can write rudimentary scripts that work. It's only when your needs are more demanding that you have to master the more complex workings of the Web. In a way, CGI is easy the same way cooking is easy: anyone can toast a muffin or poach an egg. It's only when you want a Hollandaise sauce that things start to get complicated.