Customer Reviews

Database Backed Web Sites: The Thinking Person's Guide to Web Publishing

5 star:		(40)
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Some of the specific technology described in this book is a little outdated now, but the core techniques live on.

Greenspun's writing is a delight to read, and the information he shares here will provide you with the foundational knowledge on which to build a wide variety of web applications.

Buy this book (or read the online version at philip.greenspun.com), follow the examples, and start building yourself (and others) great, content-filled, easy-to-use web sites.

Philip Greenspun is a rare find: a techie who knows how to communicate. He doesn't even limit himself to one media! While other books may take a schlolarly approach to building websites, Greenspun's story is told by someone who's rolled up his sleeves. As the reader, you get to view web-database design through Greenspun's eye for detail. All tech books should be this good.

This book focuses on the goals of Web site design rather than the nuts and bolts. Although the book contains specific code fragments, it is not a coding book. Rather it is a chronicle of Greenspun's experiences in setting up more than 50 Web sites over the years. This chronicle contains many hard-won lessons that will help prevent the reader from making similar mistakes.

Greenspun has an easy-to-read writing style and a wry sense of humor. (The book has no CD ROM attached to the inside back cover but a picture of a CD ROM with the international "No" symbol overprinted. All code an more is available from Greenspun's Web sites, as you would expect from a book about Web sites.) He also emphasizes esthetic choices and subscribes to a minimalist visual style, in the book and for Web sites, that enhance reading and make downloads as fast as possible.

It would be inefficient to repeat all the glowing compliments about this book made by previous reviewers. My favorite aspect of this must-read book are the true-to-life examples that bring the esoterica of this topic to a level the rest of us can understand and enjoy. As an example of such an example, I've quoted this from Chapter 11, on why backups are vital: "At noon, an ugly mob of users assembles outside your office, angered by your introduction of frames and failure to include WIDTH and HEIGHT tags on IMGs. You send one of your graphic designers out to explain how 'cool' it looked when run off a local disk in a demo to the Vice-President. The mob stones him to death and then burns your server farm to the ground." Need I say more?

An entertaining book, no doubt, but highly subjective and cynical. The author is obviously not a Microsoft fan (a lot of NT bashing) and he doesn't have much good to say about the Unix camp, or for anything else for that matter. The excessive use of sarcasm makes the book fun to read but it's obvious that the author has spent way too much time in the academia. If you don't know anything about web database publishing, after you read this book, you still won't. But it's fun reading and there's some good web secrets here and there. I enjoyed it anyway. The author is certainly a knowledgeable person and does a good job telling you what's wrong with the current tools. Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you how to fix them. Get it for the laughs.

His philosophy on web commerce changed my way of thinking.....it's like tv used to be: give away the content to the viewer, and let the advertisers pay the freight. I also agree there is too much emphasis on bells and whistles, and not enough attention paid to simple GOOD CONTENT when building sites. Hats off to Mr. Greenspun!

This book begins with a big-picture view of how to go about setting up shop on the world wide web. It really covers everything, from the basic questions of "should I do it myself?" to "what OS/DB/Machine should I choose?" This is a must read for any serious techie (or seriously brave non-techie) about to begin a serious web development job. Ultimately, it comes out saying that: For any serious development, you must get a database-backed site. And it offers a good picture of the landscape of how to go about choosing between all the alternatives in this area. Finally, although it is very big-picture, there is enough code here to last a lifetime. All of this is done in a very tongue-and-cheek, self-deprecating way. An enjoyable read. Get this one.

MIT computer science professor Greenspun has been designing and implementing web sites (big successful ones) for years rather than months, and it's obvious from the book he knows of what he speaks. No punches are pulled skewering software and hardware companies for design flaws, bad customer service, etc... names are named! A fair amount of code is given, but the main attraction is his intelligent overviews of all the major issues I, a novice to this area, was looking for (e.g. fundamental design issues, pros and cons of various scripting languages and servers and database engines). The site design perspectives in particular are very valuable. Grenspun has a wicked sense of humor... reading the book literally had me laughing out loud every few pages! The book is written for 'the intelligent layman', and he 90%+ succeeds IMHO; there were parts I felt I needed more more programming background to really understand. Other than that one caveat, I view it as an almost flawless book that I'd recommend to anyone interested in this topic. BTW he has a dynamite web site

Very unique book. Presents viewpoints that one has to look very hard to find nowadays: accurate, not sugar-coated, and honest.

The most useful *concept* in the book is that sticking to standards is good; a site that looks great but is all line breaks and font tags is a (mostly) useless site.

The most useful *tool* (for me) was actually learning how a relational database works; they're a lot simpler than one would think. I've often heard of them but not even bothered to find out more because they seemed overkill for the task.

Also, AOLserver is the last thing I would have used, it being owned by the same people who brought us America Online, but it's really the best tool I've seen for the job if you really want to put up an online database; only problem I have with it is that I've not taken the time to learn some of the more advanced configuration syntax, which isn't the server's fault.

Which brings me to the third most useful toolset, Lisp and MetaHTML. (Including them together because MH is largely inspired by the former). Lisp is another thing I'd heard about but thought was the wrong tool or overkill. It's really one of the easiest languages I've seen to learn, and certainly the most elegant.

What E. Tartuffte did for graphical information in his _Graphical Display of Quantitative Information_ and _Envisioning Information_ the author of this book does for the Web.

Why don't you want to clutter your site with virtual knick-knacks? The author explains.

What is unique about the Web that offers literate people something they can't find in the books they love which drives them to seek it out on the Web? The author explains.

Why do users tear hair at sites that try to entertain as they attempt to convince users to do business with them on the Web even as those users who clicked into them looking for specific information stare at slow-loading pages laden with irrelevant images and gratuitious 'design features'? The author explains.

I'm not sure the particular project I'm contemplating will directly utilize many of the technically specific suggestions the author includes in his opus, (if I can afford to even do the thing) but he has articulated most of what was loose and vague in my own dissatisfaction with what I've found out there in netspace.

I am sure I'm not alone.