How to Set-Up and Maintain a Web Site (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

~ Lincoln D. Stein (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There is a television commercial for pasta sauce where various ingredients are mentioned, and the response is, "It's in there!" This is supposed to demonstrate the high quality of the sauce. The same can be said of this book: When it comes to building a Web site, it's in there! Lincoln Stein presents a methodical and comprehensive guide to selecting server software, HTML authoring, multimedia elements, VRML, forms, image maps, Java applets, and more. Careful attention is given to Web security. While not for beginners, the book is quite good if you're ready to go beyond a simple personal page or if you need to do serious Web development. An accompanying CD- ROM has software, templates, and examples from the book.

Product Description

Adding the most current coverage of HTML 3.2, Java, JavaScript, VRML, CGI, and Perl 5 along with expanded information on Windows NT and Macintosh, this edition also covers all aspects of WWW server design, setup, and maintenance. Includes a CD-ROM containing source code to all the examples within this text, plus much more.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 2 edition (December 21, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201634627
• ISBN-13: 978-0201634624
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #375,125 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars broad, not deep, content, December 16, 1999

By	M. J. Yuan "mel_yuan" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Great book if you're new to website administration and design. Contains crash courses in how the Web works, server admin, security, HTML, multimedia, and server-side scripting. Focused towards Unix/Perl with little or no coverage of commercial and newer products like Microsoft IIS/ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, etc. Recommended for newbies.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Decent book - some useful stuff - some not very useful, October 13, 1999

By A Customer

This book tries to cover everything but just doesn't do that great a job of it. Lots of information on Apache and other Unix type data but virtually no reference of IIS.

It starts by giving the basic background info but some of this is pretty indepth which most poeple won't understand or want to know about how the internet works. Then moves to web servers with a lot of info on Apache for Unix, a decent coverage of Website for 95/NT (although I never heard of website - seems to be similar to Personal Web Server but it's not the same), and covers breifly WebStar for the Mac. This covers 150 pages but if you only deal with one system you can skip 100 pages here. It give examples of controlling access to the site using good screen shots of dialogs.

Then it jumps to creating web sites (fairly decent job but other books are better). There is also a lot of practical information about web site development that many people just don't realize which is included. It does a great job of listing numerous free apps to help out in creating html items and converters between differently formatted docs. The apps are listed by web site and email address - I didn't verify any of them so who knows how many are out of date by now.

Finally it finishes by covering CGI, Javascript (pretty well but again other books are better and more in depth) and Java applets - not how to program in Java. No mention of VBscript. Numerous problems in examples (especially with added spaces in code) cause confusion - whoever edited this obviously doesn't program.

Overall not a bad semi-starter for someone new who need to administer a web site and must deal with the software to control access and data. It's definitely not a programming book and because it tries to cover both Unix and NT (and a little Mac) I ended up skimming 20-40 page sections of stuff at a time that I wasn't interested in. 750 pages but about 200 really proved useful (mainly because there are better references for some topics covered like CGI, Javascript, and HTML). However I did really like the listing of tools to covert data and apps to help with site development.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A web planning book for intelligent, literate readers, April 20, 1997

By A Customer

During the past few months I've reviewed dozens of books about the Web in preparation for a course I'm teaching this summer on Web marketing and commerce. Most of the books are poorly written and overly simplistic, and/or they are full of opinions and generalities of little use to actually planning a web site. Stein's book is the lone exception. It is a superb example of top-quality technical writing. The introductory chapters on the nature and uses of the Web are the best I've read, and the later chapters on web design, programming, publishing and management are full of intelligent, practical insights. This book deserves an award for its quality of writing and the value of the insights and information it provides