I was recently charged with the task of setting up shopping cart programs for a couple of clients. When they asked me if I could do that, I told them, "Sure!" Notice that I didn't say, "Sure, I know how to do that!" Luckily, they weren't listening too carefully, and I was on my way.
I knew two things about shopping carts. One is that Taylor used to roll his eyes and grunt and refuse to write one when readers would request such a beast. And two is that I'd have to bone up on CGI and Perl scripts (though I knew I wouldn't have to actually write any scripts because so many are out there for the copyin'). You could learn to write your own scripts with Colin's tutorial, but I don't have the time.
So I gave myself a refresher course on the ABCs of CGIs and now I'm going to regurgitate the lessons I learned. If you know all about CGIs and Perl, this article will be beneath you, but if you've never walked the CGI walk and aren't afraid to try, well, you're in the right place. You'll find that CGI scripts can be pretty fun because you can make your pages do all kinds of things HTML can't handle on its own.
Before you start messing with this stuff, you need to have an Internet service provider that will allow you to run CGI scripts. You should really have telnet access to your account, too. For the purposes of this tutorial, your Web server needs to be running some flavor of Unix.
Once you've got what it takes, it's time to learn what's what. Let's roll.
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