Customer Reviews

Professional Apache

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I compared the three Apache books out there, and thought this (Professional apache) was the most up-to-date and easiest to understand. I'm relatively new to programming, so I haven't gotten into the nuts and bolts of this, but what I've read so far is very helpful. It includes stuff on PHP and maybe a little XML too. Apache Server Bible was good too, but this one seemed to cover more material and was much easier to understand.

I leafed through both this book and the O'reilly book at a local store just to weight the two before making a buying decision. Professional Apache looked alot more complete and covered alot more than the O'reilly title. In fact this title seems to cover alot more than any other Apache book I have looked through.

I have found the book as being quite easy to read and understand. It also does a really good job at fully explaining the aspect of Apache that the book is talking about in that chapter. As for currency, the latest version of Apache is talks about is 1.3.9

I also did not find the book to be stale, dry reading. It was quite interesting. The book read quite quickly. I went from knowing very little about Apache to feeling quite confident with it in only a couple of days.

All in all, a very good book to have.

This is an excellent book that covers just about everything you'll need to know to get the most out of Apache. It's much more accomplished and up to date than the O'Reilly book.

Everything from advanced Apache build options to implementing virtual hosts, cgi and dynamic content (including php3) to performance and monitoring are covered in a detailed yet easy to digest way. There's a good chapter on security which covers authentication as well as server security in good depth.

The author makes little attempt to cover Apache running under Windows, though this is explained in the first chapter. However, if you can get Apache up and running on a Windows machine without help, the book will still be of enormous use.

My only criticism is that Wrox insist on putting moody pictures of their authors on the front cover of their books. Why couldn't he at least smile?

Me being a O'Reilly's books fan it is hard to say that this book ir really good, far better than O'Reilly's.

First of all, every chapters starts with a introduction to the specific technology that it will cover, this is a relief when you have to confront to dark and little known configurations, since this gives you a better understanding of what to do. Second, the chapter on security and SSL support is, as far as I can say, the best documentation to get started with. Although, after having gain some confidence with it you should read the Apache docs and the OpenSSL docs for more precise configs Third, the chapters devoted to mod_perl, mod_jserv and XML are just perfect, giving us clear explanations of many configurations for each mod', this gives a choice of how we could work on a big variety of environments and solutions

Over all this is a great book, for beginers and for people who already has some working knowledge on Apache, a great reference book too!

Happy New Year! Friends!

I bought this book in january and have been reading snippets here and there. things change rapidly with apache (right now I'm working on webdav--which wasn't even released until a month ago for apache). Still, 98% of the book is up to date and the author organizes the material extremely well. I found especially helpful the discussions on installing mod_perl, security and login access. My only complaints are that the book doesn't easily list respective functions of the standard modules on a single page, and that it doesn't list some of the apache offshoots, like apache for java and xml. I know that Oreilley is working on updating their earlier apache book (which wasn't really worth reading anyway), so there's bound to be excellent books about apache coming down the pipe. However, this book has answered every question I have had, and covers things more thoroughly than a web how-to might. Highest recommendations.

I have been trying to figure out virtual hosting for weeks now and read the chapter on setting up multiple hosts on a single Web server. All I can say it "wow". I look forward to seeing what other titles this author releases.

I have to say, for the first time I feel like I have been duped by all the stars and the praises showered on this book by amazon customers. This book is good, but does not justify its exhorbitant price.

Almost 70-80 % of the book is just an explanation of the httpd.conf file. (This is the configuration file for the server that controls almost all its functionality). If you read the documentation for apache (which is inside the config file!) carefully, you will see that this book just repeats the explanations in slightly modified text and larger font.

To summarize, read the config file, drop the book, and save some money for Christmas.

The book has a step-by-step explanation of everything that Apache does and you can do with Apache. It even has tutorials on basics like regular expressions, HTTP headers. If you want a book that tells you about Apache -- this is it. You dont need another. In a single word , fantastic.

I wanted to set up Apache on WIN 98 together with Active Perl in order to emulate multiple sites using there own CGI-BIN. I found it very frustrating using the online documentation trying to arrive at the configuration I required. This book covers all the aspects in detail and gives working examples of various configurations. Where the online documentaion says use the 'whatever' directive and then gives a simple example this book takes you through various scenarios of the directives and points out any issues you should look out for. Essentially the author has done the figuring out for me and has then written it down in a clear manner for later reference. I am Happy to recommend this book

Wow, I'm shocked to see some negative reviews here for a book that I've come to rely on all the time! Maybe it's not for everybody, but as someone who works with various installations of Apache every day, I value it as an in depth reference manual.

Apache is such a monster of an application and can be configured in so many ways that it's not always easy to see how things are working. When I come across a configuration option I haven't worked with before, this book does a great job of explaining it in a language I can understand. It always starts off by saying _WHY_ you'd want to use a particular option, and is clear about pointing out when it might be better to use a different methodology.

The chapter on content negotiation is particularly good, and made me a huge fan of ModRewrite. I was looking for a simple way to serve up dynamic PHP CGI content through URLs that looked static (so search engines could easily spider the whole site). This chapter outlined many different approaches to this sort of task and carefully weighed the trade offs inherent in each. After reading it I felt that I had made an informed decision based on the particular needs and constraints of that project.

As with any printed book about web technologies, some of it may be out of date. Note that the author has written a newer book on Apache 2.0 which probably has more recent information regarding related technologies like PHP, Perl, etc. Still, there's going to be a lot of 1.X servers out there for quite a while so this book probably won't be collecting dust on my shelf anytime soon...