Further Reading

The ACL format is documented in Section 2 of Allan Brighton's Astronomical Catalogue Library User Manual[2] (and the description in Part II is largely based on this manual). It is a subset of a proposed general format for exchanging information between remote astronomical information services which is being developed at the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) and elsewhere. The full proposal is described in the working document Astronomical Server URL by M. Albrecht et al.[1].

There are numerous books describing the HTTP and CGI protocols; I have found the The HTML Source Book by Ian Graham[5] to be useful. Similarly, there are many books on Perl. I have used Learning Perl by Randall Schwartz[7] and Programming Perl by Larry Wall and Randall Schwartz[8] and found them comprehensive, convenient and accessible.