Apache: The Definitive Guide [Paperback]

 

 

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This is a fairly comprehensive, 600-page guide to the Apache web server software. The book begins with an overview of what a web server and browser clients do, how they work, and planning/installing Apache. The book covers versions 1.3.x and 2.0.x, and the differences between them. After installation, the next few chapters explain the initial configuration required to get a working webserver, including the various directives blocks, access control, and setting up virtual hosts.
Chapter 5 discusses how to implement authentication, passwords, and more on access control, such as using .htaccess files. Following chapters describe how to change settings for various web filetypes, indexing, imagemaps, and redirection of web page requests. Chapters 9 and 10 explain using a proxy, and the multitude of logging and status options which can be configured.
One of the longer (and important) chapters, Chapter 11, goes into excellent detail about the security aspects of running a webserver. It includes discussion and examples on signatures, certificates, using SSL, and firewalls. General security precautions, real life scenarios, and even potential legal issues are addressed.
The next section goes over building and administering a large website, and the issues associated with that. Also there is a chapter on adding web applications to your site to allow flexible user interaction, such as forms submission. There are then several chapters regarding add-ons and extensions to get even more from the webserver. These include PHP, CGI, Perl, mod_perl, XML, and Cocoon. There are numerous examples of coding provided, although most of them are somewhat basic in nature. One subject that I thought should have been addressed more was integrating the webserver with a database (such as MySQL), as this is a very common requirement.
The last two chapters go over the Apache Application Programming Interface (API), and how to write Modules for Apache. This may be useful to more serious developers, but is probably too technical and difficult for the average casual user. The book closes with a good Index and there is also a very handy foldout inside the back cover which contains quick-reference data for the most commonly used configurations and commands.
Overall this book seems to "cover all the bases". It was useful to me as a beginner to set up a testing webserver, and yet has extra details and information for those more advanced webmasters. The quick reference section especially, should be very useful to experienced Apache users. I would highly recommend the book for anyone wanting to start or improve their knowledge in running the Apache webserver.

Now you may think that there are better books out there. And there maybe. However this book is a "five star" book. I bought this book for a beginning apache class. We were able to follow the instructions and down load the Apache server from the Internet. The only problem we had was with the NIS system that was not anticipated in this book. It was a lot more important to use this book to read the flat files and see how they were related to each other. The section on Extra Modules (chapter 12) gave a way to improve the server and go outside the scope of this book. This book covered more details than I was looking for; this ways different people can use the book to target their particular needs. You can safely say:

"This book has everything you need to set up an apache server."

This book offers a step by step process of installing the Tomcat webserver
to Unix (primarily) and Windows servers. at every stage, the authors have
taken the time to include the information about windows operating system.

the authors have taken the time to arrange the flow of the chapters to
match the events in a real world server configuration exercise of an
apache. the book also describes the differences in the versionf of Apache
for the benefit of users.

In all, the book is good material for the not-so experienced apache users
like me.

regards
Ravi Mahalingam
Columbia, SC Java Users group.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Good for System Admins. Otherwise... Not much to see here.
Just as an intro, I am likely to be biased towards this book because it does not cover topics that are particularly helpful to me at this time. Read more

Published on April 17 2003 by Matthew Royce Hansen

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother
I didn't find this book useful at all. In 2+ years of administering Apache on Linux and Solaris, this book didn't help a single time. Read more

Published on Mar 14 2003 by B. A. EDIGER

1.0 out of 5 stars NOT FOR TOMCAT USERS
If you are looking at this book for information about Tomcat, DON'T! The information is out-dated and limited. The authors discuss Tomcat 3.2 because Tomcat 4.0 uses Java 1. Read more

Published on Feb 13 2003 by R. T.

3.0 out of 5 stars PLEASING; BUT WITH SOME SETBACKS
Regardless of the fact that the publishers of this book claimed that it will help readers discover how to obtain, set-up, and secure the software on both Unix and Windows systems,... Read more

Published on Jan 26 2003 by reviewer

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