Customer Reviews

Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

5 star:		(203)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

... because it is the first coffee table book that I've ever bought and then proceeded to mark up - underling passages, writing notes, questions etc.

It is a totally unique book on many different levels. A computer book with photographs? I am attracted to bizarre juxtapositions, loved the concept but was confident that the execution would be lacking. I was wrong.

I didn't understand everything (this book has a good deal of code (which I skimmed over)) but at the same time is both quite accessible and an incredible resource for non-programmers. An extraordinary accomplishment.

Greenspun makes a compelling case for what he believes a web site should be and at the same time manages to offer lots of specific, practical advice. His core advice - what to do and the technologies to use - has to be on target. It's what smart people pay lots of money to smart consultants for. Unlike any other book I've read, I got the feeling that I had hired a really smart consultant who was telling me exactly what to do and what not to do.

If all of this were not enough, the book highlights several free services his site offers to other web site owners interested in providing different kinds of collaboration and interactivity. The services run on his monster machine. Cost, zero.

In closing, I'd like to give some examples of his sense of humor.

"CORBA circa 1998 is a lot like an Arizona housing development circa 1950. The architect's model looks great. The model home is comfortable. You'll have water and sewage hookups real soon now".

"Johnny drives to the bookstore and spends $30 on an 'I stole the program and now I need a book on how to use it' book".

"Desktop apps promised to deliver the power of computers to the ordinary citizen; in fact, they delivered the pain of a corporate administration job right into the ordinary citizen's home or office".

One other thing - if you're really technically inclined - he basically gives you a blueprint for making a truckload of money. With that, I'll conclude with one more quote. Just bear in mind that this is from a guy who gives away CPU cycles, gives free seminars, and will let you download this book from his web site.

"Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris".

This is the best stand alone book on web publishing that I have found. It serves as both a reference and a pretty good cover to cover read, which is rare. The loosely related photographs throughout and the high quality paper make it a good buy. It covers all the bases of putting up a web site including the hardware, programming, hosting, design, etc. (plus an outstanding primer on e-commerce) It provides great references for all its topics on both the web and in print. It has some small but useful tutorials on SQL and HTML which can help you at least get started. The thinly veiled contempt that Mr. Greenspun has for Microsoft and even Macintosh is somewhat off-putting for those of us not quite ready or able to embrace Unix; but he does try to point out the benefits of all major platforms, web servers and databases.He doesn't talk much of the future of web design because I don't think he believes that what defines a quality site will change much when we all have cable modems; he often mentions how most current "advances" in programming and operating systems were actually born in the 60's and 70's. Overall, the book gives a strong sense of being up-to-date,unlike most books about the web which seem dated by the time they are printed. I have yet to see a more useful resource for allowing would-be web publishers to see what they are up against.

Greenspun writes in a very direct, down-to-earth and, at times, self-critical manner. Graphics designers, MBA's, bloated corporate management and packaged Web solutions receive ruthless trashing (but: with good arguments to support the trashing). This book contains both technical information (albeit heavily biased towards AOLServer, TCL and Oracle) and clear explanations of the ideas and design choices.

Note, this is not a book that will teach you fancy HTML tags, really cool SQL queries or powerplay server-side scripting. You should read it for its ideas and then seek additional documentation for implementation specifics.

The book is printed on heavy, glossy paper and is stuffed with Greenspun's photographs (which may be appreciated much more at www.photo.net, a website he started several years ago). The quality of the book's binding is, sadly, quite insufficient. Even with proper care, several pages have fallen out within a few months.

In short: I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about (starting in) Web design and, most importantly, online communities.

It's interesting how a lot of readers complain about the book being all about Phil's ego and Arsdigita,(the company he created that is now part of redhat). It seems those people didn't understand much of the book or found the subject disappointingly tougher than they thought... Yes, web publishing requires more intelligence and thoughfullness some would like to believe. And this book makes you realise that, whether 1998 or 2002.
Most web sites that are data driven these days still use the same principles explained in this book. Most don't use the ACS but the whole idea behind the ACS is one that comes from a sincere desire to facilitate the creation of dynamic (data driven) web sites.
One can tell Greenspun is more than a technologist, but a humanist as well. This would explain the appearance of the book some like to critisize. Certainly Greenspun ego is present, but what can you expect from someone who's got a vast array of knowledge and wisdom to share. Definitely a book any intelligent person will love.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what it takes to create web services. Also, this book is the perfect reference for teaching a class on website development, in a manner that gives students a broad perspective before they delve into the inevitable geek stuff: web application programming, data models, and SQL queries. I've used this book at work to educate some of my cooworkers who were programmers or designers, and to give clients instructive lectures on the subject.

_Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing_ is everything that most computer books are not: it is well-written, well-organized, thought through thoroughly, funny, opinionated, beautifully laid out, beautifully illustrated, and, best of all, it will not be obsolete in three years. Anyone who is interested in database-backed Web sites (especially people who are not experienced with RDBMS) owes it to himself to take a look at this book. I've read it cover-to-cover twice: the first time to get a sense of the subject (and to be entertained), the second time to learn how to get started. Even though I'm using MySQL/PHP&Cold Fusion/Apache rather than the Oracle/AOLServer combination that Greenspun recommends and focuses on, about 90% of his book is still relevant to what I am doing. This is the best book I have bought in a long time, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

This book isn't your typical technical manual, so you won't learn how to code in HTML or Java from this. What you WILL learn is a philosophy about the power that on-line publishing has over traditional publishing methods, and a rough sketch as to how to go about implementing them. At the core is the thesis that vistors to your website should not only be able to glean information but also add content to your website, thus creating a dynamic site that people will want to visit time and time again.

The guide has an emphasis on people who have access to their own servers, so those of you looking to create a page on Geocities will not find this book very useful. In particular, you will want to have script-writing abilities and access to a database; database-backed websites are a core tenet to his thesis. Many of his examples use the TCL-based AOLserver and the Oracle database, although other solutions are explored as well.

An amateur photographer, Mr. Greenspun has peppered the book with many of his photographs, usually not relevant to the material but making the book a little more delightful to skim than your typical O'Reilly "animal" manual.

In short, if you are serious about creating web pages, whether it be for personal or business use, you should read this book first. I guarantee it will change the way you view webpage creation.

I thought I knew a lot about building good web sites, until I started reading this book. The author, Philip Greenspun is a professor of Computer Science at MIT and has built over 100 large-scale sites. The purpose of the book is twofold: to share the author's mistakes and successful strategies so that hopefully you don't have to make the same mistakes, and secondly, to emphasize how best to leverage the collaborative power of the Internet to provide services that were impossible or impractical before. Now I know how to properly engineer an RDBMS-backed site, how to build a personalization system, how to build an online community-based system (correctly), and how to build a content management system--and tie it to the personalization system. I have already incorporated many of the core concepts of the book into my own projects. This is the best web publishing book I have read to date.

I first read this book online back several years ago and the knowledge I gained helped me immensely in my professional career in enterprise database sites. While Philip has strong opinions, he is often right on the mark in my experience and he puts his money where his mouth is by publishing his material online for free. His ACS toolkit spun off into the OpenACS toolkit which uses the free open source PostgreSQL database as well as Oracle and is use by many organizations. The extensive documentation and free open source code makes it easy to implement the kind of sites this book talks about. Given the poor quality of many websites in 2002, full of "cool" features which rarely work, Philips insite into the nature of website development still hold true. I highly recommend this book and if you don't want to pay for it, try his online version ...and then pick up the hardcopy for the coffeetable!

I ordered this book because of the comments by readers here on Amazon. I feel a bit Star-Wars'd by the purchase -- yeah, it's good, but it doesn't live up to the hype.

One problem I had with Philip's book is that I, too, have built some massive Web sites (tens of thousands of pages, millions of hits daily) and my stats don't agree with his. He says "after you've tarted up your site with frames, graphics, and color, check the server log to see how much traffic has fallen" -- as if it's a foregone conclusion. But I've had the luxury of deploying the same content in both functional and flashy formats, and watching the logs fill up with 4 times as many hits for the flashy site, even though it used technology that excluded older browsers.

In other words, I'd hire Philip to build a Web site for our Support department, but I would not pay this guy to launch a new product.

I also agree with some comments that the guy is self-absorbed.

Having said all that, I still like the book. I think he makes valid points. I appreciated his experiences with building database-backed sites, especially his story about the catalog publisher who thought it'd be a snap to get his images into a database and serve them up, even though the images had random names that couldn't be associated with product numbers. I regularly get asked to do a "quick project" that is in reality a massive time-suck, so I am grateful to see how other people handle those situations, so I may handle them better, too.

His comments on photography were enlightening. I'll be scanning from film, rather than from prints, from now on.

I came across a reference to this book while searching on the Internet for information on web design. I was looking for help with HTML. The link took me to the online version of the book and before I knew what was happening, I was so engrossed in the first chapter, I hadn't even asked myself what all this had to do with web-design! I have no experience with computer programming, little with databases, and only a little "Welcome to my Homepage"-type experience with design. But I was hooked. I have since bought and read the hardcopy version, and recommended it to anyone who will listen. Those who won't, I've told them about the "photo.net" site where they can find great photos.

Yes, Greenspun is opinionated - I laughed. Yes, he refers frequently to his own company "arsdigita". Yes, he blows his own trumpet. But he sticks to his anti-commercial principles: software and computer development would progress faster and benefit more people if people were less concerned with being proprietary. As an example, he has put his book, and many of the services he mentions, on the Internet for free. I liked his championship of the user, and of networked computers. Much of what he said made sense to me and helped me think more carefully about my own websites. People who say he is in it just for the money can hardly have read the whole book. As others have noted, this is not a "How-to" book on HTML, computer programming, or even web-design. It is a broad look at the place websites have, and could have, in our technological society, and puts some difficult yet stimulating questions before the web-designer. A book written with humanity, passion, and courage.