Re: what does 1; does?

[stiller]

It's not clear where you start out, but Learning Perl is a good book to start out with. It will help you up and go with useful basics. Thereafter you should probably get yourself a copy of Intermediate Perl, which explains modules and such. By the time you get through that you might have more spesific things you want to know, and "the Camel-book", Programming Perl, should end up on your desktop soon.

Testing Perl and also Perl Best Practices are very good, and you might use them both to thumb through on the buss (or similar situations) to pick up new stuff and get inspiration.

Related and very useful is also Mastering Regular Expressions.

Take a look on the shelves of the people you work with, and ask them what they suggest you start with.

[MelaOS]

hi fellow monks~
thanks for the prompt reply, actually i've been using perl for over a year now mostly writing data extraction script from csv, excel and database. it's just that i haven't actually use perl cgi in combination with so many things at once. i was hoping that there is a name for such a thing, hehe, so i can easily find a good book which can cover all of these.
thanks~

[stiller]

Perl cgi really is a lot of things, or combinations. Finding one book that covers any combination closely is not likely. As you can see from some of the other responses, you will need to check out html and javascript if you're not familiar with them already. There is a very good html reference, "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference", you'll find use for that one, but it's not an introduction.

The hardest thing to figure out will probably be the indirection a webserver presents (here? there? serverside or clientside?) and on top of that the layers of a framework (how will the thread of execution flow through it all??) if you use that - understanding webserver and cgi will be a good start, but again, you need to check with your collegues what is used on your site, and if they have suggestions.