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I wrote "CGI Programming Unleashed" when I was 16, a scant 31 years ago (it was published in 1996, but not written in 1996). So this sort of brings me back. Almost as much as watching people review the book 20 years later and be like "it seems dated". I think the conclusion that CGI made sense to die then but not now is probably correct, but for a different reason. The main reason CGI died in large part is because it wasn't fast enough. Not the only reason for sure, but this is the general consensus. Spawning cgi children was slow, etc. Solutions were built to do in-process CGI, or separate CGI daemons. This even happened per-language with in-process CGI support for Perl, etc. In the end, as people wanted more speed, they moved away from CGI to various other ways of doing things (client side, etc). This aspect probably no longer makes sense - i'd be shocked if you couldn't make CGI "fast enough" these days without anywhere near as many hoops. To the degree hoops are necessary, they are probably saner to implement. That doesn't mean folks should move back to CGI of course - but as i said, it is probably accurate that the main reason it died probably does not hold up anymore.