Pro Apache, Third Edition [Paperback]

In this voluminous title author Peter Wainwright covers the Apache web server in detail. Chapters include Installing Apache and basic configuration, building Apache the way you want it, configuring Apache the way you want it, deciding what the client needs, delivering dynamic content, hosting more than one web site, improving Apache's performance, monitoring Apache, Securing Apache, Improving Web Server Security, and Extending Apache. It has some excellent sections on advanced configuration, handling robots, dealing with errors and handling them correctly, name-based and IP-based virtual servers, and improving the performance of your server. The section on securing Apache covers authentication (including digest and LDAP) and using SSL (including some advanced configuration techniques).

There are better books that deal with some of the specific areas of this text (for example, Hardening Apache is much more thorough on the subject of securing your server) but you won't find a more comprehensive text in a single volume than this one. Pro Apache, Third Edition is highly recommended and my first choice for anyone looking for a single book to learn how to setup and configure an Apache server or serve as their primary reference.

This is by far the best standalone book on Apache I've seen. It really is a very good reference for professional web server admins, as well as developers and others, who need help in managing Apache web servers. It's well-written too, something that is becoming increasingly rare in the technical book area.

This book contains some meaningful information but is largely obsolete.

Some fairly informative chapters contain introduction to common configuration, authentication, configuring SSL, using WebDAV and subversion.

But lot of space in the book is wasted on topics that were cool in the last century like compiling apache and compiling single modules, but not relevant anymore. Today you are likely not going to recompile you server every week, but you SHOULD install security patches every week, if you take your job seriously. IMHO there is only one possibility - to rely on the services of your linux distribution.

By the way, Debian and derived distributions also do a great job combating the mess in the httpd.conf by meaningfully dividing it in multiple configuration files, so you have a good place to put your specific settings making an automated upgrade to the newer apache version easy. So do not listen to the author, never edit your httpd.conf. ;-)

The author describes in detail topics, that are not relevant anymore in the web application development (assumed that you are creating an application, that goes besides "hello world"). Delivering dynamic content (chapter 6) used to be server-side includes and cgi but it is NOT anymore because of poor programming model and poor performance.

Typical scenario nowadays is to use apache as a front end web server, letting apache serve the static content like pictures and providing a wrapper or proxy to a high performance application server (for example mongrel if you using rails) or using mod_python for python or using zope etc. In this context I would wish elaborative description on mod_rewrite, that is pretty complicated.

My conclusion: if you are beginner, search for a better introductory book. If you are advanced developer/admin/hacker, then use primary resources like [....]