Re: ANNOUNCE: Web pages with LWP guide & examples (Perl5)
Gisle Aas (aas@bergen.sn.no)
Sat, 09 Mar 1996 11:15:29 +0100
In message <Pine.SGI.3.91.960309031515.14818D-100000@tower.york.ac.uk>, Tom Huk
ins writes:
> to use LWP (Perl 5 version only!) as I found it difficult to learn using
> the official documentation.
Yup, the documentation ought to be better. I hope this will be the
case before lwp-5.00 release is out of the door.
> There is not a great deal of information available yet, but I have
> covered most of the areas I had problems with, so newcomers to the
> library may find this resource useful. I would greatly appreciate any
> help so that we can make LWP more accessible and easier to learn.
>
> If you would like to take a look the pages are at:
> <URL:http://www.york.ac.uk/~twh101/libwww/>
>
> I would appreciate comments, suggestions and corrections (I'm only a
> relative newcomer to the package!). Let me know if you think this is a
> useful resource or just a waste of time. If people find it useful I will
> work on the pages some more and then announce them outside this mailing list.
You have done a great job. I really appreciate this initiative. I will
try to make sure that the cookbook eventually covers most of your
examples.
One important thing that is missing from the current LWP documentation
is a gentle introduction to the HTTP request/response paradigm and how
it can be applied for other protocols. If you don't understand this,
then I would believe that the LWP OO interface will look unnecessary
complicated (but then again, perhaps it is :-). People should not have
to read the HTTP protocol specification in order to make any sense of
the library.
Some small corrections:
In <URL:http://www.york.ac.uk/~twh101/libwww/http_post.html> you say:
...unless you are using Perl5.002 which is currently under beta
testing and so is not recommended for use.
This is not true. Perl5.002 is now officially released.
In <URL:http://www.york.ac.uk/~twh101/libwww/install.html> you suggest
that people just move the "lib" directory to some suitable place. This
does not work with the LWP versions that use autoloading (after 5b7 I
think). You need to install using "make install". You should be able
to set the installation PREFIX during construction of the Makefile.