CGI Programming Unleashed

by Eugene Eric Kim


C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S



Chapter 1  What CGI Programs Can and Can't Do

Chapter 2  The CGI Specification

Chapter 3  Crash Course in CGI

Chapter 4  Comparison of the Various CGI Programming Libraries

Chapter 5  Designing Your CGI Application

Chapter 6  Testing and Debugging

Chapter 7  Server-Side Includes (SSI) and Gateway

Chapter 8  Forms and How to Handle Them

Chapter 9  Security

Chapter 10  Databases

Chapter 11  Searching and CGI

Chapter 12  Imagemaps

Chapter 13  Proprietary Extensions to Servers

Chapter 14  WinCGI The Basics

Chapter 15  Windows CGI: Database Backending

Chapter 16  DOS CGI: The Basics

Chapter 17  Voting Booths

Chapter 18  Discussion Forums

Chapter 19  Chat Rooms

Chapter 20  Multi-User Games and CGI

Chapter 21  Tracking Users

Chapter 22  Simple Order Entry

Chapter 23  Shopping Carts

Chapter 24  Java and JavaScript Alternatives to CGI

Chapter 25  ISAPI

Chapter 26  NSAPI

Chapter 27  ActiveXControls

Chapter 28  ActiveX Scripting

Summary

appendix A  Web Resources




Copyright C 1996 by Sams.net Publishing

FIRST EDITION

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About the Authors

Daniel Berlin is a high-school senior at The Peddie School in New Jersey. He has worked as a programmer in local industry during summer vacations, and he has done technical editing and consulting in the past year. He expects to pursue a career in computer science and law. Dan is well known in the CompuServe community, where he has been a forum leader of various forums as well as an active contributor.

Richard Liam Dice is the vice president of Anadas Software and Internet Development, a Canadian company specializing in the production of high-end Web sites and CGI programming. He studied at the University of Western Ontario and has a B.Sc. degree in applied mathematics, concentrating on programming mathematical models of physical and astrophysical situations. His first exposure to the Internet was in 1990. He has been a regular user of the Internet and a UNIX programmer since 1992. Richard started using the Web in mid-1993 and has been programming CGI applications, usually using Perl 4, since early 1995.

António Miguel Ferreira is one of the founders and the Web expert of Esoterica S.A., an Internet service provider in Portugal. He graduated with a degree in computer science and engineering in INSA Lyon, France. He has developed financial-analysis software and currently manages several corporate Web sites for different kinds of clients, based on different hardware and software platforms. He has authored technical articles in some magazines. His other book is entitled Searching for Gold in the Internet. You may reach him at [email protected]. His home page is at http://www.esoterica.pt/amcf/.

Shuman Ghosemajumder is the president of Anadas Software and Internet Development, a leading producer of high-end corporate Web sites and commercial CGI application software. Shuman began in the software industry as a developer of real-time workgroup applications on networked personal computers in the C language. He co-founded Anadas Software and Internet Development in 1995. It now serves clients all over the world. Anadas's head office is in London, Canada. Shuman holds a B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Western Ontario.

Ken Hunt is a vice president at Anadas Software and Internet Development. Ken brings to Anadas a wealth of experience in developing software for commercial and scientific applications on many different platforms. His projects have included human blood flow modeling, evolutionary population dynamics, and simulations of the behavior of black holes. An award-winning public speaker, Ken has spoken on the potential of emerging technologies to Fortune 100 companies and university groups in North America and Europe.

Bill Schongar can be found playing multimedia developer and all-purpose Internet guy at LCD Multimedia, in Nashua, NH, doing things like breaking-uh, improving-the systems, helping people find ways to waste their free time, and having fun. When not staring at a computer screen, he can be found in the woods of New Hampshire, being eaten by vicious bugs or trying not to get tagged by paintballs.

Randy Yarger ([email protected]) pretends (when the friendly men in white coats let him) he is the systems administrator for H-Net, Humanities OnLine at Michigan State University. He can be reached at http://yarger.tcimet.net/, but please, no sharp objects.

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