Amazon.com info for 'Professional Apache'

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Back to reviews and details of Professional Apache

Amazon.com reviews:

Rating: 5 Summary: Excellent Reference
Comment I bought this book in August 2001 and I still keep it close at hand. It has paid for itself over and over again. Most times I wonder how can I do "?" in apace? And this book has delivered everytime.

Now I think I'll buy his book on Apache 2.0

Rating: 1 Summary: This book is terrible
Comment This book is absolutely terrible. This is merely a reference of all the options you can configure for apache and by no means helps a user through the examples. This author has no clue how to write a technical book. He merely put all of the options into one book. I have read hundreds of technical books and this one is ranked at the bottom.

SAVE YOUR MONEY - BUY A DIFFERENT BOOK ON APACHE.

I cannot understand ANY of the reviewers that state this is a good book. Extremely disappointed.

Rating: 5 Summary: A Great Reference to Have On Hand
Comment 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As with any printed book about web technologies, some of it may be out of date.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...

Rating: 5 Summary: A Great Reference to Have On Hand
Comment 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...

Rating: 3 Summary: Oldish by now, sorry to say
Comment As good as it may look at first there are problems under the surface. The book is printed in 2000 meaning that PHP installation is out of date, for instance. Moreover, the 40+ pages about JServ integration are pure junk as the product JServ no longer exists and has been replaced by a totally different product (Tomcat). Also, there are several things that are not discussed at all even though they are referred to (the htdocs directory, for instance). As somebody stated all of this information can be found more up-to-date in the Internet now. I like the book, however :-)