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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.
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I really like the cookbook format as it allows me to see solutions in application. I have often found solutions to different (but related problems) by using the skill set. I'd love to pick this up!
Why is the 1.3 still so popular? Is the version 2 still unstable or something?
But if you want you can use a more modular approach instead of keeping everything in one single file. Debian sid is currently experimenting with this in interesting ways in the apache2 packages.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Has there ever been an open source program as successful as the Apache web server? If we leave aside the various p2p freeware for music sharing, then perhaps none. Certainly, if we restrict our survey to web servers, Apache is head and shoulders above its peers. It is currently in its second major revision, 2.0, and is very stable and mature.
.NET/C# dynamic content. I am not sure that Apache can handle these yet, so you should stick with Microsoft's server
This book gives you a good grounding in both installing and running it, even if you have never run a website before. Those of you who used earlier versions may recall various installation shell scripts. At one point, these only ran on unix platforms. But this book makes clear in the first chapter that this is no longer true. An installation wizard gives you an easy walkthrough. Plus you can now install it on Microsoft Windows.
So given that Apache is free, shouldn't you already be using it? If you have only static content, or dynamic content that is restricted to the traditional cgi or the newer perl or PHP, then the book's sections on those show full functionality.
Remember too the other advantage cited in the book. Apache is extensible. So if you have a simple need that can be met by tweaking the existing source, you can do it yourself, instead of asking a vendor and waiting [and paying]. Plus, if Apache itself has a bug that you cannot fix, you know there will be many developers on the net who will do this, and quickly, because so many of us depend on Apache.
What are you waiting for?
The only caveat is when you should NOT use Apache [and this book]. Naturally, the book does not go into this, so let me help you. If you will be using EJBs, Java Server Pages or transactions, then this is higher level logic that, as far as I know, Apache does not currently handle. Instead, you should opt for J2EE web servers provided by jBoss, Sun, IBM, BEA or Oracle. Likewise if you have
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