Sybex's main selling point for this book is the fact that it is a mere 20 USD. That's a pretty cheap price for a book of its kind, unfortunately though, the book also feels cheap and rushed. Each of the 18 chapters in the book is taken another book published by Sybex. Seven chapters are spent explaining Javascript, and about the same are spent on Perl.

This book is definetly aimed towards those with little experience in the web development field, and also those who have little knowledge of web servers, coding, and the interaction between a web server and the user. This can get annoying to those who know the internet basics.

The book can be very confusing at times. For example, the second chapter on perl introduces a relatively complicated program, and does little to explain how it worked until a few chapters later. Also, many of the javascript examples simply did not work, and required a lot of editing. Throughtout reading it, I often found myself referencing online tutorials to overcome confusion and to better explain what had been shown in the book. Also, I felt that I wasn't actaully learning how to program javascript and perl. The book is what I would call very "mission-specific", in the way that it gives examples on certain things, such as making a guestbook, monitoring logs, precessing forms and working with e-mail, but doesn't really delve into explaining it all well. I felt that I wouldn't be able to any other programming, outside of what they specifically showed.

One thing that I found good about this book was the appendixes. The three appendixes (javascript objects, perl functions and perl modules) have a lot of good information and I found quite resourceful.

At the most, I could say that this book is an okay way to introduce someone to javascript and perl, but not very good at actually teaching anything. A buyer would probably be better off getting a book for one specific programming language, that goes into the details and the real hows and whys, if the buyer actaully wants to learn some useful prgramming skills.