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Apache Cookbook
The book has twelve chapters, covering everything from installation and adding modules through to proxies and performance. The chapter on security is the largest, it covers the topics well. By contrast I thought the chapter 'Aliases, Redirection and Rewriting' too short and could have benefited from some more 'recipes', but that may be due to my own bias - mod_rewrite is not an easy topic, and as I've said it causes me a great deal of grief.
It is laid out in a similar way to the Perl Cookbook: each recipe has a 'Problem' section followed by a 'Solution' and then 'Discussion.' In almost all the 'recipes' the 'Discussion' is longer than the 'Solution,' and I often found it far more useful and informative than the problem and its solution.
The Apache Cookbook covers almost all aspects and all parts of the learning curve for Apache. That will either be a strength or a weakness of this volume for you; with such a large and complex piece of software as Apache a single book cannot hope to cover it in a great deal of depth. For me this book was not really a cookbook, more a good source of well documented examples from which to create my own recipes,
My biggest problem reviewing a book like this is that after several years building and configuring Apache (even on an infrequent basis) quite a lot of this volume seems simple. You may also find it the same if you are the sort of person who is not afraid to pore over the documentation, get your hands dirty and make a few mistakes. If you like some hand holding and are just starting with Apache you may benefit from all of it.
That's not to say that I didn't personally find large chunks of this volume useful. Certainly I've gone over several of the recipes and their excellent explanatory text to shed some light on previously dark corners of Apache, particularly as the authors cover both Apache 1.3 and 2.0.
O'Reilly have the usual web page with a Table of Contents and example chapter. The example chapter, on error handling is well chosen as it is typical of the others and useful but not the most useful chapter.
I have recently been thinking that tech books fall into various sorts and there is one sort I'd call 'library books' - books you may not need to own, but will want to read every so often and would be good to have in your local or company library. Apache Cookbook is one of these, a book I'd recommend everyone coming to grips with Apache has close to hand, but it is not going to be constantly on your desk in the same way that Perl Cookbook might be for Perl programmers: to start off with, it's half the size and doesn't cover nearly as many topics. This one falls short of essential due to it's concentration on breadth. rather than depth. So my recommendation for this book is not that all Apache administrators should buy it, but you should have a copy close at hand.
You can purchase the Apache Cookbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Don't use Apache or any freeware because, as Microsoft rightly point out:
You are taking jobs away from commercial companies.
Also, by using open source software, you are a communist, as well as a Economic terrorist.
We should use BEA, Microsoft, IBM solutions etc which put money back into the economy and keep people in jobs.
Thought I was going to get some good Native American cooking recipes.
What if you need 20 out of 400 and understand 100? Or understand 18 needing 15 of 32, or even worse, need 12 out of 11 with understanding of 2. Or 13, 18, 4597, 129, 97...
Obviously picking the right web server can be a tough proposition.
What do you call it when someone is intentionally putting loud, obnoxious statements into circulation, but they aren't exactly trolling? Or is that trolling, too? I don't know--listen to this guy:
"Yes, that's hard but you must admit that I have a point."
Everything about this is calculated to piss off the Slashdot reader--the overt arrogance (Mensa membership!?? Are you kidding!??), the attempt to seem like an authority on the subject by making overly specific assertions, even down to the bad punctuation! On top of that, he starts throwing down about PHP and Perl--yeah, when I want to make a well-reasoned argument, the first thing I do is start flaming a religious OSS obsession. Good strategy.
Now, I don't want to be too judgemental, because I can get pretty snippy myself (it's good to blow off steam by smacking someone around), but I think this goes further--it's a calculated attempt to piss people off for the purpose of pissing people off.
His argument doesn't even make any sense--the *right* tools for a job, ANY job, are the tools that fit that particular job. For small, non-scaling apps that need quick and easy-to-maintain/modify structures, PHP/Perl and Apache work wonderfully. Why the fuck should anyone start fucking around with Corba for building a web forum? Especially when the skills to work in PHP are much more common, and therefore cheaper?
I'm not trying to point out that he's wrong--I'm just trying to show how totally ungrounded the post is.
I've seen this account do this before--not always, so maybe it's not a straight-up troll account--but he IS just being an asshole.
You must not do much with sendmail....
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
So you run a porn site?
;-)