Summary

The shopping cart program that we create in this chapter has shown you that by reusing some of your existing code you can save a lot of time and energy. Keep in mind that the code you reuse needs to be a close fit to what you are looking for. In our case, the BasicSession module is almost exactly what we are looking for. And by using a general library for managing sessions (which happened to have a handy tied-hash interface), we were able to avoid any new direct database access.

Now that you have this as a good starting point, take any of the remaining common code, and merge it into a more versatile program. Add sales tax/VAT computations, shipping charges, or a gift wrapping option. You have the beginning; don’t stop now!