37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Book Review - Apache: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition), November 4, 2003
This review is from: Apache: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
This is a fairly comprehensive, 600-page guide to the Apache web server software. The book begins with an overview of what a web server and browser clients do, how they work, and planning/installing Apache. The book covers versions 1.3.x and 2.0.x, and the differences between them. After installation, the next few chapters explain the initial configuration required to get a working webserver, including the various directives blocks, access control, and setting up virtual hosts.
Chapter 5 discusses how to implement authentication, passwords, and more on access control, such as using .htaccess files. Following chapters describe how to change settings for various web filetypes, indexing, imagemaps, and redirection of web page requests. Chapters 9 and 10 explain using a proxy, and the multitude of logging and status options which can be configured.
One of the longer (and important) chapters, Chapter 11, goes into excellent detail about the security aspects of running a webserver. It includes discussion and examples on signatures, certificates, using SSL, and firewalls. General security precautions, real life scenarios, and even potential legal issues are addressed.
The next section goes over building and administering a large website, and the issues associated with that. Also there is a chapter on adding web applications to your site to allow flexible user interaction, such as forms submission. There are then several chapters regarding add-ons and extensions to get even more from the webserver. These include PHP, CGI, Perl, mod_perl, XML, and Cocoon. There are numerous examples of coding provided, although most of them are somewhat basic in nature. One subject that I thought should have been addressed more was integrating the webserver with a database (such as MySQL), as this is a very common requirement.
The last two chapters go over the Apache Application Programming Interface (API), and how to write Modules for Apache. This may be useful to more serious developers, but is probably too technical and difficult for the average casual user. The book closes with a good Index and there is also a very handy foldout inside the back cover which contains quick-reference data for the most commonly used configurations and commands.
Overall this book seems to "cover all the bases". It was useful to me as a beginner to set up a testing webserver, and yet has extra details and information for those more advanced webmasters. The quick reference section especially, should be very useful to experienced Apache users. I would highly recommend the book for anyone wanting to start or improve their knowledge in running the Apache webserver.
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19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Waste of paper, December 1, 2006
This review is from: Apache: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
Most of the time you can trust O'Reilly technical books. But this dog should be drug out back and shot. It's out of date, it's poorly written, it meanders all over the place. I'm pretty tolerant of technical writing as long as I'm learning what I need to along the way. But at a time when I was highly motivated to get up to speed on Apache I literally gave up and threw this on the floor in frustration. Buy any other book on Apache. This one sucks.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Helpful, but questionable..., September 11, 2008
This review is from: Apache: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition) (Paperback)
This book reads like a journal of somebody who has never configured a web server at all, literally saying things like, "We tried this, and we got this error message". While the author is trying to create a noob friendly book here, it comes off like it was written by noobs (which probably isn't actually the case).
There are also some questionable things, for example, they create a shell script that must run in a particular directory. They actually say "you must cd to the directory first" and then use the shell built-in 'pwd' instead of the dot operator for the current directory -- twice on one line! This comes off as pretty noobish to me. In the old days, this would cause 300,000 lines of kernel code to execute an external program and return, but at least the shell implements pwd as a builtin these days. Still, it was one of those small things that makes you wonder about a book...
Despite this, the book IS useful for a noob to learn some Apache basics and make the conf files more readable. I had a 10 year old Apache Bible with Y2K material in it that in some ways was more helpful. Still, I am still reading the relevant sections and the book is helping me get a task done at work.
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