This month's column referred to a number of pieces of software that were explained in greater detail in previous installments of “At the Forge”.
The September, October and November 1997 installments of “At the Forge” described in detail the use of relational databases in designing web sites. The server used in those columns, as well in this month's installment, is MySQL, a mostly free relational database server. You can read more about MySQL at http://www.tcx.se/.
For some excellent ideas and information about the use of databases on web sites, check out Web Tools Review, written by Philip Greenspun and available on the Web at http://www.photo.net/wtr/.
If you are interested in learning more about HTTP cookies, you should read the original Netscape document on the subject, available on the Web at http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html.
For an introduction to the use of cookies, as well as some sample code, take a look at http://www.illuminatus.com/cookie.fcgi.
The Text::Template module, written and maintained by Mark-Jason Dominus (mjd@pobox.com), is available from CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). You can find the closest CPAN mirror site to your Internet connection by pointing your browser to http://www.perl.com/CPAN/. Included in the distribution is documentation that should be more than enough to get you started and which demonstrates the package's major features.
Finally, CGI programmers using CGI.pm should read the well written documentation for that module, which includes some basic information on how to handle cookies from within your programs. CGI.pm, like nearly all Perl modules, is available via CPAN.
All listings referred to in this article are available by anonymous download in the file ftp://ftp.ssc.com/lj/listings/issue48/2079.tgz.