CGI is the first and remains one of the most widely-used means of extending Web servers by interfacing external applications, offering various advantages. However, the power of CGI comes with a price. CGI interfaces can completely compromise a Web server's security, and thus of the host on which it is running. All benefits of a CGI script are neutralized if it is insecure. It is impossible to anticipate (and defend) against all security holes. But by following a few guidelines, you can avoid known security holes and unsafe practices.

CGI and Perl Resources

CGI and Perl CGI ('Common Gateway Interface') is a web-server technology supported by most web hosts, that allows (for example), scripts to be implemented on your web-server.

An Introduction to writing CGI's in Perl

Kyla Computing has now a 3 day Perl CGI training course. It has been designed for anybody who is wants to be move involved in server side web development. Perl is the normal language for creating page counters, guest books and processing web site forms and as such, is the interface betwen your site and your applications.

Beginning Perl

Beginning Perl for learner.

CGI Programming on the World Wide Web

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) emerged as the first way to present dynamically generated information on the World Wide Web. CGI allows the computer to generate Web pages instantly at the user's request rather than being written by someone in advance. And at the time of this writing, it remains the only stable and well-understood method for creating such pages. Java presents problems that have not yet been solved. Other products are currently just in the announcement stage.

Teach Yourself CGI Programming with PERL

CGI programming involves designing and writing programs that receive their starting commands from a Web page-usually, a Web page that uses an HTML form to initiate the CGI program. The HTML form has become the method of choice for sending data across the Net because of the ease of setting up a user interface using the HTML Form and Input tags.

Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days, Second Edition

This book is designed to teach you the Perl programming language in just 21 days. When you finish reading this book, you will have learned why Perl is growing rapidly in popularity: It is powerful enough to perform many useful, sophisticated programming tasks, yet it is easy to learn and use.

Perl 5 Unleashed

Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from these files, and printing reports based on that information. It is also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical-easy to use, efficient, and complete-rather than beautiful-tiny, elegant, and minimal. Perl was written by Larry Wall (lwall@sems.com), with the help of lots of other contributors.

Picking Up Perl (2nd Edition)

This book has been created for a number of reasons. The primary reason is to provide a freely redistributable tutorial for the Perl language. In writing this freely redistributable tutorial, it is our hope that the largest number of people can have access to it and share it.

Perl Tutorial - An Introduction to Perl

Perl is a 'Practical Extraction and Report Language' freely available for Unix, MVS, VMS, MS/DOS, Macintosh, OS/2, Amiga, and other operating systems. Perl has powerful text-manipulation functions. It eclectically combines features and purposes of many command languages. Perl has enjoyed recent popularity for programming World Wide Web electronic forms and generally as glue and gateway between systems, databases, and users.