Using the Applications in This Book

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You don t just develop theoretical demonstrations here we ll develop several complete applications that can actually be used. You might use some of them with little modification, but it s more likely that you ll want to make more significant changes to suit your own purposes. For that reason, when reading about an application, don t take the attitude, How can I force-fit the problems I want to solve into these applications? Instead, ask, How can I adapt this code for my own situation? It s more important that you understand the code for each example application we develop than that you look at it as a finished product. Think of the programs as not-yet-hardened clay that you can shape to conform to your will.

For concreteness, applications developed in this book typically are presented in a particular context, but they re often usable in other ways. Therefore, don t assume an application cannot help you just because it s presented to solve a problem that doesn t immediately seem to apply to your situation. It s not very productive to ask questions such as is this a business application? or is this a personal application? What you should concentrate on are the particular techniques an application illustrates and how you might use them. In the next chapter, for instance, we develop a simple application for maintaining a to-do list. If you re setting up an online store, you may not be interested in that it might seem more applicable to people who want to write notes to themselves, not people who want to conduct business. But one thing the application does is enable you to take input from the Web and store it in a database. When you understand how this works, you can adapt the concept for business purposes, such as an application that enables your customers to submit questions to you asking for product information or price quotes. As another example, later on in the book, we ll deal with online ordering techniques. If you re building a site for a nonprofit organization that serves an educational purpose by disseminating information, you might consider these techniques useless to you on the basis that you are not in business and you are not selling anything. Suppose, however, that your Web site enables people to request printed documents. If so, you re providing a product, just like a regular business. You can use shopping-cart techniques to let site visitors request multiple documents while specifying name and shipping address only once (rather than for each document they want). It s true those techniques often are used in commercial contexts, but they can be used for noncommercial purposes, too. You may as well exploit them to make your Web site more useful and convenient for your visitors.

I don t always show the complete source for applications, but you can download the files you need to make it easier for you to try out the applications and to use them as a basis for your own modifications. All the source and data files used here are available from the book s companion Web site:

http://www.kitebird.com/mysql-perl/

The next chapter discusses the basic issues involved in getting your MySQL and Apache servers configured to work together and how to write Web scripts that access your database. If you re new to Web database programming, you should read that chapter carefully to acquire the background you ll need for the rest of the book. Readers with more experience may prefer to skip directly to later chapters, although it s a good idea to at least skim through Chapter 2, because it describes a number of conventions used throughout the book.

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MySQL and Perl for the Web
MySQL and Perl for the Web
ISBN: 0735710546
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 77
Authors: Paul DuBois

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