This isn't another cookie-recipe approach to planning a successful Web site.
Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, by MIT veteran Philip Greenspun, is both broadly conceptual and deeply technical, and it assumes that the reader is willing to think seriously about the challenge of building a content site, a community site, or an e-commerce store before plunging in.
Although heavily Unix-oriented, it does not set out to proselytize a product, or even suggest that there is only one way to solve certain technical challenges. Rather, it encourages the reader to think about Web content and functionality as something designed to help visitors answer questions or do something useful. This may sound nebulous, but his observations about why Web sites go bad are illustrated with many well-chosen examples.
The core of the book is quite technical. Three long sections on publishing, community, and e-commerce architectures are illustrated by the author's data models and working open-source systems, so someone with C, SQL, and a good understanding of Internet Protocol (IP) under his or her belt will get the most out of the discussion. Such technical readers will find numerous Web addresses and other citations for further technical information. The author also invites readers to use his code if appropriate.
Although there is a lot of technical meat here, Greenspun dispenses with a dry, technical tone. Throughout, he manages to speak to the reader in a way that is always interesting and frequently bemused or ironic. The overall effect is that of a wry professor who knows his stuff, has thought about the problems, and isn't about to engage in commercial puffery. --Kathleen Caster
A technical manual that is also a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, this is the oddest, most interesting guide on web design and publishing this reviewer has ever read. "This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I've made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years," writes webmaster Greenspun, who teaches at MIT. Covering web publishing and web-based services in a lively, engaging tone, he makes complex technical ideas simple and accessible to beginners and nontechies who have to manage large web sites. Drop-dead photos taken by Greenspun and available for free on his site (www.photo.net) illustrate the text. Greenspun also gives away almost all the software he writes about and uses, and the entire book is available on the web (http://www. photo.net/wtr/thebook/). Still, all libraries should seriously consider getting one or two copies of the wonderful print version.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"If you want to be a part of where the Web is going, you need to read this book..."
-Dave Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet, 1981-1989
"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."
-Edward Tufte, WIRED Magazine, June 1998
"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."
-J. Paul Holbrook, Director, Internet Technologies, CNN
From the Back Cover
"If you want to be a part of where the Web is going, you need to read this book..."
—Dave Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet, 1981-1989
"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."
—Edward Tufte, WIRED Magazine, June 1998
"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."
—J. Paul Holbrook, Director, Internet Technologies, CNN
From the author's preface:
This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I've made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won't have to repeat those mistakes.
For the manager in charge of a Web publication or service, this book gives you the big picture. It is designed to help you to affirmatively make the high-level decisions that determine whether a site will be manageable or unmanageable, profitable or unprofitable, popular or unpopular, reliable or unreliable. I don't expect you to be down in the trenches typing Oracle SQL queries. But you'll learn enough from this book to decide whether in fact you need a database, whom to hire as the high database priest, and whom to allow anywhere near the database.
For the literate computer scientist, I hope to expose the beautiful possibilities in Web service design. I want to inspire you to believe that this is the most interesting and exciting area in which we can work.
For the working Web designer or programmer, I want to arm you with a new vocabulary and mental framework for building sites. There can be more to life than making a client's bad ideas flesh with PhotoShop and Perl/CGI.
For the users of the world, I document a comprehensive open-source approach to building online communities and show a collaborative Web-based way that we can dig ourselves out of our desktop application morass.
About the Author
Philip Greenspun has been in and around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1979. He alternates between teaching traditional electrical engineering classes and teaching "Software Engineering for Web Applications", a course that he co-developed with Hal Abelson. This has been a successful course at MIT and is being used by computer science departments at 20 other universities around the world. Greenspun is the author of two textbooks used at MIT, including
Internet Application Workbook. Greenspun is an instrument-rated private pilot and has flown his Diamond Star across most of the North American continent and two-thirds of the Caribbean islands. In the mid-1990s, Greenspun founded the Scalable Systems for Online Communities research group at MIT and spun it out into ArsDigita, which he grew into a profitable $20 million (revenue) open-source enterprise software company. The software is best known for its support of public online communities, such as www.scorecard.org and www.photo.net, which started as Philip Greenspun's home page and grew to serve 500,000 users educating each other to become better photographers.
