Chapter 2: The Basics    (01)

<Next | Table of Contents | Previous>    (02)

General Programming Strategies    (03)

You now know all of the basic concepts necessary to program CGI. When you understand how CGI receives information and how it sends it back to the browser, the actual quality of your final product depends on your general programming abilities. Namely, when you program CGI (or anything for that matter), keep the following qualities in mind:    (04)

• Simplicity    (05)
• Efficiency    (06)
• Generality    (07)

The first two qualities are fairly common: try to make the code as readable and as efficient as possible. Generality applies more to CGI programs than to other applications. You will find as you start developing your own CGI programs that there are a few basic applications that you and everyone else want to do. For example, one of the most common and obvious tasks of a CGI program is to process a form and e-mail the results to a certain recipient. You might have several different forms you want processed, each with a different recipient. Instead of writing a CGI program for each different form, you can save time by writing a more general CGI program that works for all of the forms.    (08)

By touching upon all of the basic features of CGI, I have provided you with enough information to start programming CGI. However, in order to become an effective CGI developer, you need to have a deeper understanding of how the CGI communicates with the server and the browser. The rest of this book focuses on the details that are skimmed over in this chapter and discusses strategies for application development, as well as the advantages and limitations of the protocol.    (09)

<Next | Table of Contents | Previous>    (010)

Copyright © 1997 Sams.Net Publishing    (011)