# Quality Online Resources for Perl Beginners

Perl beginners might be tempted by online books like [this][1],
simply because they are readily available. In this case, I would not
recommend this book even after just skimming the online
chapters.

One of the biggest things that jumped out at me was the chapter on
CGI form processing - using hand-rolled variable processing and no
taint-checking are big no-no's. What explained this was the book's
copyright - 1996 - a lot has happened in Perl in the past ten years,
including [CGI.pm][2], and [many][3] [fine][4] templating systems.

A much better and more recent (2000) online Perl book is [Beginning
Perl][5]. For simple CGI, [Ovid's Perl CGI course][6] is excellent.
Beginners to Perl should also check out [learn.perl.org][7] and he
[perlmonks.org tutorials][8], in particular the [Getting Started
With Perl Section][9].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060901115025/http://affy.blogspot.com/p5be/
[2]: http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-2.45/
[3]: http://www.masonhq.com/
[4]: http://www.template-toolkit.org/
[5]: http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl/
[6]: http://www.easystreet.com/~ovid/cgi_course/
[7]: http://learn.perl.org
[8]: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Tutorials
[9]: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=Tutorials#Getting-Started-with-Perl