Who should attend: Programmers with a light background in Perl and HTML. No previous CGI experience is required. If you don't have any Perl background, read the Llama book first or take the S2 tutorial on Sunday. This is neither a "for non-programmers" course nor a "for guru programmers" course. It's for "accidental programmers," folks other than UNIX systems gurus who need to deal with CGI and WWW programming.

What you will learn: CGI and other WWW programming using Perl.

All aspects of writing and processing fill-out forms are covered using the standard CGI.pm module. Some attention is also given to parsing of HTML documents and writing "spiderbots", automata that navigate the Web on their own. Specific topics include:

- A light introduction to using Perl's object-oriented class libraries
- Setting up your server for CGI and SSI
- An overview of the CGI protocol and SSI

• CGI-related environment variables
• CGI without forms
• Debugging your CGI programs
• Using UNIX-domain sockets to serialize access to daemons
• Non-parsed headers scripts

• Setuid execution and taint checking
• Avoiding the perils of shell escapes and backquotes
• Backgrounding long-running CGI programs
• Non-parsed headers scripts
• Sending mail safely

• Remote browser and remote user determination
• Generating dynamic forms; multistage ("shopping cart") forms
• Credit-card algorithms
• File uploads
• Database access using flat text or HTML files, DBM files, or a full SQL database
• HTML parsing and link analysis

Tom Christiansen is a consultant specializing in Perl applications, optimizations, and training. He is a frequent instructor at USENIX conferences.

Tutorials at-a-Glance     Tutorial Instructors