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Perl for Web Site Management
In his preface, Callender describes his own transition from a writer and editor to the kind of one-man-band that, back in the '90's, we called a "webmaster". He characterizes himself and others in the same boat as "accidental programmers", and justly praises Larry Wall for creating a programming language that enables such novice coders to do useful things right away. "Like natural languages, one of the ways in which Perl makes easy things easy is that it is designed to let you get by using only a small subset of the language. As Larry puts it, Perl lets you talk baby talk, and in Perl such baby talk is officially okay."
For non-programmers, this is a better Learning Perl than Learning Perl. The latter title, by Schwartz and Phoenix, is explicitly intended for established programmers seeking to add Perl to their existing tool belt of languages. Perl for Web Site Management is for the folks Apple used to call "the rest of us". Callender assumes no knowledge on the part of his reader beyond some familiarity with HTML and the web; this starting-from-zero approach makes the book maximally inclusive, while his ability to convey a lot in a small space brings the newbies a long way in the space of a couple chapters. He provides thorough redirection to the standard sources of Perl and Internet lore (the perl* man pages, the standard Perl programming texts, and others).
Virgin programmers, when they're through with Perl for Web Site Management, will find themselves able to make effective use of Perl programs to automate a plethora of tasks, including mass manipulation and modification of a site's files; server log analysis (using Perl's powerful regular expression facility); link checking (using the LWP module); and auto-generating an annotated site map from the <META> tags in the site's HTML files. The latter part of the book introduces server-side web application programming using CGI (examples include coding a site Guestbook and integrating with the SWISH-E site search facility), along with more advanced lore like the CPAN code archive, Perl's object-oriented features, storing user data in DBM databases, and publishing modules for reuse by others. Along the way, the book teaches a respectable amount about UNIX, as well; the main text, as well as the many informative sidebars, contain concise and clear explanations of necessities like stdin/stdout redirection; chmod and file permissions; shell filename globbing; tab completion in bash; network troubleshooting with traceroute; and much more.
Callender's writing style provides the right mix of hand-holding, humor, and clarity for the book's target audience. He simplifies without dumbing down, and he proves that he picked up a considerable amount of hacker culture on his own journey up the learning curve, which he shares with his pupils, citing sources from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line to Jon Udell's Practical Internet Groupware. He also does a good job of evangelizing the culture of sharing and open systems that created Perl, Apache, and the Internet as we know it, giving abundant proper credit to the authors and creators of all the tools and references to which he refers his readers. He concludes by listing, and providing jumping-off points for, the wide variety of logical "next steps" that go beyond the scope of the book: Python and other programming languages for the web, Apache configuration, mod_perl, system administration, and relational database integration.
As you may have guessed by now, I recommend this book highly, especially for anyone who finds him- or herself with responsibility for maintaining a web site but feeling a bit underequipped to do so. The book has a limitation (which is not the same as a shortcoming): it's a tutorial, not a reference work; though the index is quite serviceable, this isn't the book to turn to when you need to remember the order of the arguments to substr. This is a book to sit down and read through, once or multiple times, to help build a framework of knowledge and begin populating it with pearls of wisdom that can be put to immediate use.
Additional information about the book, including code for the examples given, is available on the web at the author's web site, O'Reilly's page for the book, and at the online bookseller site of your choice. Table of Contents:
Preface
1. Getting Your Tools in Order
Open Source Versus Proprietary Software
Evaluating a Hosting Provider
Web Hosting Alternatives
Getting Started with SSH/Telnet
Meet the Unix Shell
Network Troubleshooting
A Suitable Text Editor
2. Getting Started with Perl
Finding Perl on Your System
Creating the "Hello, world!" Script
The Dot Slash Thing
Unix File Permissions
Running (and Debugging) the Script
Perl Documentation
Perl Variables
A Bit More About Quoting
"Hello, world!" as a CGI Script
3. Running a Form-to-Email Gateway
Checking for CGI.pm
Creating the HTML Form
The <FORM> Tag's ACTION Attribute
The mail_form.cgi Script
Warnings via Perl's -w Switch
The Configuration Section
Invoking CGI.pm
foreach Loops
if Statements
Filehandles and Piped Output
die Statements
Outputting the Message
Testing the Script
4. Power Editing with Perl
Being Careful
Renaming Files
Modifying HREF Attributes
Writing the Modified Files Back to Disk
5. Parsing Text Files
The "Dirty Data" Problem
Required Features
Obtaining the Data
Parsing the Data
Outputting Sample Data
Making the Script Smarter
Parsing the Category File
Testing the Script Again
6. Generating HTML
The Modified make_exhibit.plx Script
Changes to &parse_exhibitor
Adding Categories to the Company Listings
Creating Directories
Generating the HTML Pages
Generating the Top-level Page
7. Regular Expressions Demystified
Delimiters
Trailing Modifiers
The Search Pattern
Taking It for a Spin
Thinking Like a Computer
8. Parsing Web Access Logs
Log File Structure
Converting IP Addresses
The Log-Analysis Script
Different Log File Formats
Storing the Data
The "Visit" Data Structure
9. Date Arithmetic
Date/Time Conversions
Using the Time::Local Module
Caching Date Conversions
Scoping via Anonymous Blocks
Using a BEGIN Block
10. Generating a Web Access Report
The &new_visit and &add_to_visit Subroutines
Generating the Report
Showing the Details of Each Visit
Reporting the Most Popular Pages
Fancier Sorting
Mailing the Report
Using cron
11. Link Checking
Maintaining Links
Finding Files with File::Find
Looking for Links
Extracting
Putting It All Together
Using CPAN
Checking Remote Links
A Proper Link Checker
12. Running a CGI Guestbook
The Guestbook Script
Taint Mode
Guestbook Preliminaries
Untainting with Backreferences
File Locking
Guestbook File Permissions
13. Running a CGI Search Tool
Downloading and Compiling SWISH-E
Indexing with SWISH-E
Running SWISH-E from the Command Line
Running SWISH-E via a CGI Script
14. Using HTML Templates
Using Templates
Reading Fillings Back In
Rewriting an Entire Site
15. Generating Links
The Docbase Concept
The CyberFair Site's Architecture
The Script's Data Structure
Using Data::Dumper
Creating Anonymous Hashes and Arrays
Automatically Generating Links
Inserting the Links
16. Writing Perl Modules
A Simple Module Template
Installing the Module
The Cyberfair::Page Module
17. Adding Pages via CGI Script
Why Add Pages with a CGI Script?
A Script for Creating HTML Documents
Controlling a Multistage CGI Script
Using Parameterized Links
Building a Form
Posting Pages from the CGI Script
Running External Commands with system and Backticks
Race Conditions
File Locking
Adding Link Checking
18. Monitoring Search Engine Positioning
Installing WWW::Search
A Single-Search Results Tool
A Multisearch Results Tool
The map Function
19. Keeping Track of Users
Stateless Transactions
Identifying Individual Users
Basic Authentication
Automating User Registration
Storing Data on the Server
The Register Script
The Verification Script
20. Storing Data in DBM Files
Data Storage Options
The tie Function
A DBM Example Script
Blocking Versus Nonblocking Behavior
Storing Multilevel Data in DBM Files
An MLDBM-Using Registration Script
An MLDBM-Using Verification Script
21. Where to Go Next
Unix System Administration
Programming
Apache Server Administration and mod_perl
Relational Databases
Advocacy
Index
You can purchase Perl for Web Site Management from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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One of the goals of Perl 6 is to make non-trivial projects possible. That's good. The way it's being done is bad. Perl was once a lightweight, extremely flexible language. Now it's become a huge ugly monster. People wanted OO, so a nasty hack was bolted on top to allow some semblance of it. Now this nasty hack is being expanded. Sure, the code's different, but the basic form is the same. Kludge upon kludge upon kludge; I'd much rather have a nice, clean, pure language (and not one with loads of irritating whitespace thankyou very much).
The same goes for the syntax. All the switching between $, @ and % is really irritating (ask a newbie how to get at the length of the keys array of a hash inside a hash, for example), and the changes proposed for 6 are just making this worse -- it seems that Larry, in his infinite wisdom, wants to prefix every data type with a different hard-to-type character. Perl was only designed for the three data types, and adding more is a mess.
Perl 6 is a complete rewrite, but it keeps all the mess which has accumulated over the previous versions. This is not good. Sure, my const int $var = 27; may look neat (in the same way that, say, Pascal does), but $var isn't entirely constant, or entirely an integer, it's just a hack which makes it sort of behave like one. The whole thing is an exercise in pseudo-computer science masturbation with little real purpose except to please the managers who dislike the one thing that makes Perl special.
On a similar note is regexes. I'm an avid fan of regular expressions simply because a nondeterministic finite automata is far more flexible than linear code. However, Larry must have been smoking that cheap $2 crack when he wrote this. Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
I won't be going on to use 6. It's a nice idea, but it's completely unnecessary. It won't make large projects any easier to manage (the language is still, at heart, an almighty hack -- an impressive one, but still a hack). It won't make OO any cleaner. It won't make development any faster. To put it bluntly, Perl scripts will still look less beautiful than our friend Mr Goatse. I'd prefer to use a language which has always been pure synthesis of science and engineering, not some half-baked imposter.
Perl 6 will be nice, but I'm guessing it will be the end of Perl. It can't do what it wants to do whilst still being based upon a nasty mess. There are now other options, which provide all of Perl's power and none of the mess. Sorry, but *BSD^H^H^H^HPerl is dying. Larry is buggering it up the ass without lubricants, just like Shoeboy is doing to Larry's daughter.
Here's the stuff that got edited out before the book made it to press (whew!)
Chapter 22: Appendices
Listing: PERL is better than every other language. A comprehensive set of comparisons.
Obfuscate code in your site. Common methods.
Being l337 with perl CGI's (and not getting caught) Effective $kr|p7 k|dDl3 methods.
Gaining root access to your ISP (The most effective local and remote exploits you can execute via perl)
PERL::Pr0n Syntax and HOW-TOs guide.
Thank god for editors!
Perl long and prosper!
If you were a bowl of hot grits, would you pour yourself down your pants?
I'm sure it'll result in more complicated websites that are maintained by undocumented Perl scripts. It'll probably result in security holes via the scripts too, despite the effort put into taint mode.
Most importantly, will there be any net gain in design and usability? I realize that there are learning curves with all scripting/automation tools; the realization that automation may be applied to a previously point-and-drool editing task is, I'm sure, a huge step forward for most organizations. I don't pretend to be at the top of that learning curve myself; I'm just far enough up it that I look back at projects I did a few months ago and I want to hide my head in shame because of the little thought I put into design and usability when I did them.
JismTroll is teh r0x0r
/.'ing for us!), and I need to know how to modify PERL scripts. Our budget is pretty thin ~$100/year, so most of this is DIY. Sounds like this should be helpful to me.
/.
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Perl for Web Site Management
Perl | Posted by timothy on 10:45 AM -- Tuesday July 16 2002
from the do-stuff dept.
PerlDiver writes: "Perl for Web Site Management by John Callender is for web professionals -- designers, editors, HTML jockeys -- who have never programmed before, but who now find themselves with the need to create their own site-management tools, automated web clients, and web-based applications. The title is an understatement; the book covers not just Perl programming but the bulk of what a novice needs to learn to function in a UNIX environment, from pwd and man to installing software packages from source tarballs. If you or anyone you know wants to cross the chasm from 'content' to 'code,' get this book." Read on for the rest of his review.
In his preface, Callender describes his own transition from a writer and editor to the kind of one-man-band that, back in the '90's, we called a "webmaster". He characterizes himself and others in the same boat as "accidental programmers", and justly praises Larry Wall for creating a programming language that enables such novice coders to do useful things right away. "Like natural languages, one of the ways in which Perl makes easy things easy is that it is designed to let you get by using only a small subset of the language. As Larry puts it, Perl lets you talk baby talk, and in Perl such baby talk is officially okay."
For non-programmers, this is a better Learning Perl than Learning Perl. The latter title, by Schwartz and Phoenix, is explicitly intended for established programmers seeking to add Perl to their existing tool belt of languages. Perl for Web Site Management is for the folks Apple used to call "the rest of us". Callender assumes no knowledge on the part of his reader beyond some familiarity with HTML and the web; this starting-from-zero approach makes the book maximally inclusive, while his ability to convey a lot in a small space brings the newbies a long way in the space of a couple chapters. He provides thorough redirection to the standard sources of Perl and Internet lore (the perl* man pages, the standard Perl programming texts, and others).
Virgin programmers, when they're through with Perl for Web Site Management, will find themselves able to make effective use of Perl programs to automate a plethora of tasks, including mass manipulation and modification of a site's files; server log analysis (using Perl's powerful regular expression facility); link checking (using the LWP module); and auto-generating an annotated site map from the tags in the site's HTML files. The latter part of the book introduces server-side web application programming using CGI (examples include coding a site Guestbook and integrating with the SWISH-E site search facility), along with more advanced lore like the CPAN code archive, Perl's object-oriented features, storing user data in DBM databases, and publishing modules for reuse by others. Along the way, the book teaches a respectable amount about UNIX, as well; the main text, as well as the many informative sidebars, contain concise and clear explanations of necessities like stdin/stdout redirection; chmod and file permissions; shell filename globbing; tab completion in bash; network troubleshooting with traceroute; and much more.
Callender's writing style provides the right mix of hand-holding, humor, and clarity for the book's target audience. He simplifies without dumbing down, and he proves that he picked up a considerable amount of hacker culture on his own journey up the learning curve, which he shares with his pupils, citing sources from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line to Jon Udell's Practical Internet Groupware. He also does a good job of evangelizing the culture of sharing and open systems that created Perl, Apache, and the Internet as we know it, giving abundant proper credit to the authors and creators of all the tools and references to which he refers his readers. He concludes by listing, and providing jumping-off points for, the wide variety of logical "next steps" that go beyond the scope of the book: Python and other programming languages for the web, Apache configuration, mod_perl, system administration, and relational database integration.
As you may have guessed by now, I recommend this book highly, especially for anyone who finds him- or herself with responsibility for maintaining a web site but feeling a bit underequipped to do so. The book has a limitation (which is not the same as a shortcoming): it's a tutorial, not a reference work; though the index is quite serviceable, this isn't the book to turn to when you need to remember the order of the arguments to substr. This is a book to sit down and read through, once or multiple times, to help build a framework of knowledge and begin populating it with pearls of wisdom that can be put to immediate use.
Additional information about the book, including code for the examples given, is available on the web at the author's web site, O'Reilly's page for the book, and at the online bookseller site of your choice. Table of Contents:
Preface
1. Getting Your Tools in Order
Open Source Versus Proprietary Software
Evaluating a Hosting Provider
Web Hosting Alternatives
Getting Started with SSH/Telnet
Meet the Unix Shell
Network Troubleshooting
A Suitable Text Editor
2. Getting Started with Perl
Finding Perl on Your System
Creating the "Hello, world!" Script
The Dot Slash Thing
Unix File Permissions
Running (and Debugging) the Script
Perl Documentation
Perl Variables
A Bit More About Quoting
"Hello, world!" as a CGI Script
3. Running a Form-to-Email Gateway
Checking for CGI.pm
Creating the HTML Form
The Tag's ACTION Attribute
The mail_form.cgi Script
Warnings via Perl's -w Switch
The Configuration Section
Invoking CGI.pm
foreach Loops
if Statements
Filehandles and Piped Output
die Statements
Outputting the Message
Testing the Script
4. Power Editing with Perl
Being Careful
Renaming Files
Modifying HREF Attributes
Writing the Modified Files Back to Disk
5. Parsing Text Files
The "Dirty Data" Problem
Required Features
Obtaining the Data
Parsing the Data
Outputting Sample Data
Making the Script Smarter
Parsing the Category File
Testing the Script Again
6. Generating HTML
The Modified make_exhibit.plx Script
Changes to &parse_exhibitor
Adding Categories to the Company Listings
Creating Directories
Generating the HTML Pages
Generating the Top-level Page
7. Regular Expressions Demystified
Delimiters
Trailing Modifiers
The Search Pattern
Taking It for a Spin
Thinking Like a Computer
8. Parsing Web Access Logs
Log File Structure
Converting IP Addresses
The Log-Analysis Script
Different Log File Formats
Storing the Data
The "Visit" Data Structure
9. Date Arithmetic
Date/Time Conversions
Using the Time::Local Module
Caching Date Conversions
Scoping via Anonymous Blocks
Using a BEGIN Block
10. Generating a Web Access Report
The &new_visit and &add_to_visit Subroutines
Generating the Report
Showing the Details of Each Visit
Reporting the Most Popular Pages
Fancier Sorting
Mailing the Report
Using cron
11. Link Checking
Maintaining Links
Finding Files with File::Find
Looking for Links
Extracting
Putting It All Together
Using CPAN
Checking Remote Links
A Proper Link Checker
12. Running a CGI Guestbook
The Guestbook Script
Taint Mode
Guestbook Preliminaries
Untainting with Backreferences
File Locking
Guestbook File Permissions
13. Running a CGI Search Tool
Downloading and Compiling SWISH-E
Indexing with SWISH-E
Running SWISH-E from the Command Line
Running SWISH-E via a CGI Script
14. Using HTML Templates
Using Templates
Reading Fillings Back In
Rewriting an Entire Site
15. Generating Links
The Docbase Concept
The CyberFair Site's Architecture
The Script's Data Structure
Using Data::Dumper
Creating Anonymous Hashes and Arrays
Automatically Generating Links
Inserting the Links
16. Writing Perl Modules
A Simple Module Template
Installing the Module
The Cyberfair::Page Module
17. Adding Pages via CGI Script
Why Add Pages with a CGI Script?
A Script for Creating HTML Documents
Controlling a Multistage CGI Script
Using Parameterized Links
Building a Form
Posting Pages from the CGI Script
Running External Commands with system and Backticks
Race Conditions
File Locking
Adding Link Checking
18. Monitoring Search Engine Positioning
Installing WWW::Search
A Single-Search Results Tool
A Multisearch Results Tool
The map Function
19. Keeping Track of Users
Stateless Transactions
Identifying Individual Users
Basic Authentication
Automating User Registration
Storing Data on the Server
The Register Script
The Verification Script
20. Storing Data in DBM Files
Data Storage Options
The tie Function
A DBM Example Script
Blocking Versus Nonblocking Behavior
Storing Multilevel Data in DBM Files
An MLDBM-Using Registration Script
An MLDBM-Using Verification Script
21. Where to Go Next
Unix System Administration
Programming
Apache Server Administration and mod_perl
Relational Databases
Advocacy
Index
You can purchase Perl for Web Site Management from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
JismTroll (588456)
[ Preferences ]
Related Links
Learning Perl
SWISH-E
In the Beginning Was the Command Line
the author's web site
O'Reilly's page for the book
Perl for Web Site Management from bn.com
book review guidelines
submission page
PerlDiver
More on Perl
Also by timothy
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Update: 20020427 12:50 by timothy
Mac PVR Coming Soon Perl for Web Site Management | Preferences | Top | 4 comments | Search Discussion
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Furst P0st
by Anonymous Coward on 10:46 AM -- Tuesday July 16 2002 (Score:-1, Offtopic) (#3894706)
propz to all dead homiez
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Perl vs. PHP
by Bonker on 10:49 AM -- Tuesday July 16 2002 (Score:2) (#3894734)
(User #243350 Info) http://www.furinkan.net/ [ Neutral ]
While Perl is certainly a much more powerful and flexible language, most website management functions can be carried out much more simply and in less time in PHP since it was designed with website management and database connectivity in mind.
PHP is roughly Perl-based, and is probably a more appropriate language for beginning coders than Perl, IMHO. Having written website management tools in both languages, if I had to do it again, I'd do it in PHP.
--
- "Monitoring cable modems without a warrant is double-plus-ungood".
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
Just what I've been looking for
by Hee Hee Hee on 10:51 AM -- Tuesday July 16 2002 (Score:1) (#3894748)
(User #310695 Info) [ Neutral ]
I'm starting up our church's website (no WAY am I posting the link - no
--
- Bill
[ Reply to This | Parent ]
i luv
by anthrax_spork on 10:53 AM -- Tuesday July 16 2002 (Score:0) (#3894760)
(User #532086 Info) [ Neutral ]
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oh boy, people developing web apps in PHP or Perl don't keep track of the latest developments in web land. try Java (JSP) or even better : Python (Zope).
Having written in way too many languages, am I the only one to realize that Perl is pretty much a write-only language? I don't want to maintain my own perl code, much less anyone's else's. Almost any language would be better than perl for this job.