Even though it's a step up from the CGI Primer Plus for Windows book (and gets a 4 star rating), it still leaves much to be desired for the person who learns by coding!

A good place to start
I purchased "CGI Programming with Perl" thinking it was, like many O'Reilly books, a bible of programming how-to for the working programmer. It's not. What it is, in fact, is a pretty good introduction to writing CGIs with Perl for someone who has some basic knowledge of Perl and HTTP, but who has never done any CGI programming. And that's just the position I was in when I bought it.

The first third of the book is introductory in nature, with an introduction to how forms and CGI scripts work, some discussion of parsing forms in other languages, and some simple examples. The bulk of the book contains more complex examples of tasks like writing questionaires, interfacing with relational databases, maintaining state, graphics and so forth. I did glean a lot of useful information there.

The biggest problem with this book is a problem that's really common to all book on Internet programming: Standards are changing so fast that a year old book is likely to contain chapter upon chapter illustrating obsolete techniques and libraries. In "CGI Programming" there are a lot of examples using Perl modules that haven't really caught on, while some of the newer modules (obviously) aren't meantioned. Another problem is that the book is kind of scattershot in the attention it gives different topics.

Still, I think this is one of the better books for someone with basic Perl skills looking to get started with CGIs. There's enough detail here to start writing CGIs, and enough information out there on the web to go on learning.