Well our test cgi program was the equivalent of a "hello world" program. It sent some output so we could see that the system was working, but it didn't do any input or processing. That is by design of course. Your first program in any new system should be dead simple so that you can concentrate on getting the system bits outside your program connected together properly without having to worry about problems within your program. But having got those program-system interactions working it's time to tackle complete programs.
Recall that we have two main things to sort out within our programs (as opposed to the myriad relations of our programs to things outside themselves like systems and server software):
Producing HTML for the browser instead of text for the console.
Getting our input from HTML forms instead of the console.
We saw on the previous page that 1. could still be done using print statements since HTML is also a textual format. So let's turn our attention
to 2.