Customer Reviews

Apache: The Definitive Guide

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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 1.2 and the authors state "...Java 1.2, is less widely available than Java 1.1..." This book was Published in December 2002. Java 1.2 was available in 1999, you do the math! This is unacceptable. I find it ironic that another book, "Professional Apache Tomcat," (WROX), which was published before new Apache book covers 4.0, even 4.1! It also appears, from the tone of the book, that the authors do not care much for Java and would rather the reader use Perl.

Do not buy this book if you want Tomcat information. Honestly for straight Apache information I would stick with the 2nd edition of the Apache book and use on-line resources.

Sadly O'Reilly books are lacking in quality lately.

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, do not bank on these claims if you are a Windows user.
The truth is that these publicity-claims are applicable to Unix, Linux and BSD platforms. Windows systems users need a lot of prayers, for events to shape-up as they would like.
Conversely, for non-Windows users, there is a lot to celebrate. This updated edition covered (the latest) Apache 2.0 without compromising on the older 1.3 version. Also, there are new sections on Cocoon, Tomcat, mod_perl, PHP, and several others.
Overall, this is a good book; but would have been impeccable, if all the claims its publisher advertised have real life applications.

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. Use the Apache documentation provided along with Apache (the web server) instead. You'll be a lot better off.

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.

If you are a System Administrator, get this book. It will help you configure Apache down to great detail. If you are a programmer, get the online information. It is more up to date.

This book did increase my knowledge of security for Apache, as security is covered well in this book. It covers troubleshooting for both Unix and Windows (As if a Windows system is secure enough to run a web server) Systems.

As I am a programmer in the Java Language, I was disappointed to see that the authors pushed toward using scripting languages with Apache rather than full programming languages. This will limit what you can do with the Apache Server. This is a very sad commentary.

Also, being a programmer, I am more interested in the API's rather than the configuration of a Web Server. Now that the book is already outdated, the API's in the book are no good to me. So I use the API's provided with the Apache documentation. Not to mention, the authors recommend using Java 1.1. It has been several years since Java 1.2 has even been released. Did the authors do their research on Java before they printed the book?

This book covers the installation and configuration of mod_perl and Tomcat/j_serv, this was just fine for mod_perl (a scripting language), but did not help my cause, as I use Tomcat, and the authors are not very knowledgeable for Java based applications.