Basic Notes about Perl/CGI

Before we jump to our first "Hello World!" script. Lets get some basics up and ready.

Things You Should Know About Perl

- It is used by major websites like the BBC.co.uk, Craiglist, DuckDuckGo, Amazon, ImDB, LiveJournal and projects like the Cpanel, Slashdot, Bugzilla, etc. So yeah, its not as obscure as one would initially think.

- Perl is often said to be difficult, but that might be because it is a "Jack of all Trades". It requires a bit more patient approach to learn. So the rule to remember, when learning Perl is "Stay in the Ice".

- You can find perl scripts to accomplish almost everything on

http://www.cpan.org

https://www.metacpan.org

But here is the catch: Explanations are a bit hard to follow. And there is no attached forums, to discuss the modules. When you get stuck, try to Google a solution or ask a question on:

http://www.Perlmonks.org

https://www.stackoverflow.com

Things You Should Know about CGI

- CGI is old, slow and inefficient for most of the stuff. Around 10x times slower than its modern avatar FCGI. 

-Most of the time people will tell you how CGI is outdated/slow/crap/etc, and would tell you about one of the Web Frameworks of Perl, like Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst etc. Well listen to them, if you want to take the easy road, these frameworks really are a 'job well done' and makes a lot of things easy for you. 

But if you want to take the hard way(slightly), its better to learn the very roots on which these frameworks are built.

- Also, on various Shared Hosting (like Godaddy.com) you would find a folder called 'cgi-bin'. You would have to put all of your .cgi/.pl/.fpl scripts into this folder in order to run them. With Permissions 600 or 700 or 705 in order to run them.