Thomas Valentine - Database-Driven Web Development: Learn to Operate at a Professional Level with PERL and MySQL

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It has been three years since I wrote a technical book. I enjoyed writing this book as much as I did the first for Apress, some years ago. One of the hardest parts of writing this book was to separate the weed from the chaff. That is, what should I include that will make you, the reader, experience an aha! moment after reading a particularly eye-opening chapter or section?

I separated the useless information that always seemed to be repeated in one way or another within all of the books Ive read on the subject. I realized that some knowledge was missing from the books Ive read on database-driven web development. I broke down the constituent parts of the common cgi script and thought back to when I was learning Perl and MySQL. I remembered the questions I asked myself and what would have been useful to know. These techniques took me years to perfect. Im looking forward to hearing your feedback on what you learn from my techniques.

I develop in Perl and MySQL, so that is what this book will be teaching you. Perl is a wonderful language to work with. It can be learned in a weekend but takes many years to master. MySQL is a great partner to the abilities of the Perl scripting language. It too can be learned in a weekend.

In the chapters to come, youll be introduced to some concepts that you know and understand. My hope is to take that morsel of knowledge further and expand on it until the wider picture is placed in your mind. I go the extra step and present it in an intuitively obvious form with plain language explanations and simple to understand examples, each example building on the knowledge imparted from the last.

Well explore concepts that Ive not been able to find in any other book on the subject. They all seem to generate the same knowledge, but with only minor concepts you might already know. They all look alike and, in my opinion, dont go very far past the minimum to get the job done.

Ive broken up the chapters of this book into logically consecutive blocks of knowledge. In the examples to come, youll be taught not only how Perl and MySQL work, but how the four main languages and specifications all work together to generate a fully formed HTML document. Understanding those four specifications (HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript) is crucial to your success as a web developer. They must be taught in a way that shows their flexibility and well-thought-out implementation.

Using Perl and MySQL with those four specifications is stimulating and rewarding. Theres always a moment of personal satisfaction when a particularly tricky script works perfectly for the first time.

I hope I put forward the concepts and techniques in an easy-to-understand but still information-packed book. Read on, and remember the only limit is your imagination.