Customer Reviews

Open Source Web Site Construction Kit

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I'm a little biased because I hooked Thomas up with the SAMs editors, my brother was a collaborator on his earlier book, and I helped out with this one, but I only confess this to put my biases on the table: I would not have done any of that if I didn't think Thomas Schenk was up to the task, and he exceeded my wildest dreams as an opensource writer.

This is not just another book about configuring webservers. Yes, it includes how to configure the systems, how to cluster servers and all that hot jazz, but far more importantly, this book asks you to face those hard questions that make the difference between a webserver and a business webserver. This is a book from someone who knows what he's talking about; Tom was the server master behind Deja.com and currently consults for Penguin Computing. He knows your server is not a mere capital asset; a successful web venture depends on vitality and communications as much as it depends on throughput and uptime.

This is also not just another book about Linux and Apache; Tom goes to the heart of the business case for opensource on mission critical systems. There are example applications of many alternative server, eBusiness and content management packages, but these are brandnames that will change with time: The essential lessons of opensource that emerge from the many case studies will continue to be valuable long after all these names have vanished from memory.

The book is well-written, particularly helpful for people they have little or no experience in Open Source. It saves time giving advice and proposing GNU products for various web-services. The most important for me was Part III, where the subject becomes more demanding and difficult : Scalability, Availability, Site-Management and Load-Balancing. Though I have not test them yet, the proposed solutions seem applicable, sound and reasonable and integrate the endeavour for a complete Open Source environment.