CGI Tutorial

CGI is the Common Gateway Interface which allows you to create Web pages on the fly based on information from buttons, checkboxes, text input and so on. The pages can be images, sounds, text and indeed everything else transferable by the Web. They can even be references to other Web pages. In this tutorial we concentrate on creating HTML documents (rather than images and sounds) but the principles transfer readily to other formats. This should provide a good start to cope with the more comprehensive documentation elsewhere. For example, you should be able to find your way around the CGI programmer's reference with greater purpose, and perhaps some of the CGI material on Yahoo.

The tutorial was written by me, Nik Silver, and is a follow-on from the Perl tutorial derived from the workshop run recently at the School of Computer Studies at the University of Leeds. It does therefore assume a knowledge of Perl, as well as how to create a basic Web page.

• What CGI scripts are
• A simple CGI script
  • Exercise
• CGI environment variables
  • Exercise
• Packaging information
  • Exercise
• Forms
  • Submit buttons
  • Checkboxes
  • Radio buttons
  • Text boxes
  • Exercise
• Text areas and the POST method
  • The POST method
• Appendix: Source code for examples