The World Wide Web is more than a place to put up clever documents and pretty pictures. With a little study and practice, you can offer interactive queries and serve instant information from databases, worked up into colorful graphics. That is what the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) offers.

This book offers a comprehensive explanation of CGI and related techniques for people who hold on to the dream of providing their own information servers on the Web. This edition has been completely rewritten to use the current techniques available in version 5 of Perl and two popular Perl modules, CGI.pm and CGI_lite.

Good scripting is not limited to a knowledge of CGI — you need to know something about other programming tools that organize data and make the output look attractive. Gundavaram starts at the beginning, explaining the value of CGI and how it works, and takes you swiftly into the subtle details of programming. The book offers a comprehensive look at the job of providing information dynamically on the Web.