Perl and MySQL Web Development

Perl and MySQL Web Development: A Data-Driven Approach teaches large-scale data-driven web development with the Perl scripting language and the MySQL database. This book concentrates on the practical coding required to build robust and capable web applications with Perl and MySQL. Starting from the fundamentals, we move from code snippets to fully functional Perl scripts that culminates in the project for the book - a feature rich data-driven bulletin board.

Packed with code examples, this book leaves no stone unturned. The various practical methods the reader will require to build powerful web applications are covered in detail, using plain language descriptions and exercises. To cover the various implementations and configurations available with this program set, what we’ll do is work through a working example of a fairly complex bulletin board program that will utilize the full capabilities of Perl, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database. We’ll explore the various possibilities available for the creation of dynamic, data-driven web pages.

The project is a working example of the technologies at play and a fully functional and feature rich data-driven bulletin board program. A bulletin board is a collection of topics that the users can post threads in. Within these threads are text, or text and image posts, that reflect the thread and topic categories. A bulletin board is a very good way to allow the reader to understand the meshed open source technologies of Perl, MySQL, and Apache. Each of the three relies on the others to achieve a working Internet offering. These three open source technologies were selected because of their prevalence on the Internet. They’re robust and very capable examples of the open source schema.