While meeting with the high school teacher, we managed to get a fair amount of ground covered. Since he doesn't know Perl, he needs to buy as much time as possible and since this will be a Perl/CGI beginning programming class (I can hear the screams of horror from the audience already), he planned to spend the first two weeks covering basic HTML. That's actually nifty as he'll have a nice extra chunk of time to learn Perl and he has enough information from his HTML classes that he won't have as much prep time to worry about.
His syllabus, though, worries me.
He spends an entire week on scalars, but this is four weeks after introducing Perl. Not good. Admittedly, he doesn't know what a scalar is, so he's just going by the table of contents of Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web and this has led him, and me, down this dangerous path. I'll work with him to fine tune this stuff.
Any recommendations for a good book introducing Perl and CGI? Every one that I have come across as been absolutely horrendous. Elizabether Castro's book (second edition only) seems to be the best of a bad bunch. If the teacher had the time, I'd have him working with two different books: an intro to Perl and an intro to CGI, but that's not an option.
My opinion is that John Callender's Perl for Web Site Management is a better introduction to Perl for CGI (and a few other things) than Castro's book.
Re:Better Books?
Ovid on 2002-08-27T00:28:07
Thanks for the tip. I'll check it out. While I had heard about the book, I hadn't considered it because I hadn't read it (much less skimmed it) and the title "Web Site Management" sounds considerably more involved than the basics of what they're trying to offer these kids. Still, I would much rather have a book be slightly off-target than teach Bad Things.
This reminds me that I need to get around to posting a review of Elizabeth Castro's book. It's much better than the first, but she still constructs headers and cookies manually and one of her programs has (IIRC) a null-byte hack vulnerability. I found that ironic as she was using that program to demonstrate how taint checking works.
Re:Better Books?
davorg on 2002-08-27T05:42:12
See my review of Callender's book.
One of my biggest complaints was that the title really didn't reflect what the book was about.
