In September, 1995, I was asked if I would be interested in contributing some of my CGI scripts to a new book that would be published by John Wiley & Sons. I said sure, and wrote five chapters in the book entitled Developing CGI Applications with Perl. Each chapter included one of my free programs to help make your web site more interactive, as well as a description of how to set it up and use it. This book was published in March, 1996, and therefore is fairly outdated by new material out, although some of the fundamental concepts remain in use.

Following that, in January, 1996, Que Publishing asked if I would like to contribue two chapters to their book Special Edition: Using CGI. You can read the book for free at itlibrary.com or take a look at the chapters I wrote: Chapter 9: How to Handle Custom Imagemaps and Chapter 20: Tips and Techniques for Perl. The first edition was published in April, 1996 and then a second edition in March, 1997.

Then, on February 17, 1996, Craig Patchett wrote and offered to let me co-author a book with him. We shopped the idea around to several publishers and finally decided to go with Wiley. This book took us a long time, as we wrote all new code for 7 full programs and 13 time-saving subroutines. Over a year and a half later The CGI/Perl Cookbook finally arrived in stores in October of 1997. I was responsible for more than half the code, the CD-ROM and the web site, while Craig took care of all writing and layout, as well as some code.

The scripts from Matt's Script Archive have also appeared on the CDs of several other books, including Teach Yourself CGI Programming with Perl in a Week and Enhancing Netscape Web Pages. Many books include them without even asking, so knowing exactly where they've appeared is tough unless people tell me.