Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

This book is outdated (references Windows 95 only), and does not provide a step-by-step guide for testing from a Windows workstation. I bought this book because I wanted to set up a lab at home to run Apache on a FreeBSD machine, and use a Windows 2000 workstation as the client. The book seems to concentrate on the use of Apache directives; however, this can be obtained for free at the www.apache.com website. This book starts with a poor attempt to lead the user to building a working website, but it fails from lack of details, and also appears to lack from experiential knowledge. If you are looking for a hands-on guide to help you set up and run a lab to learn Apache web hosting, and test using the IE browser, this books will let you down. Scary that it's called "The Definitive Guide". It certainly wasn't worth the $34.95 + tax, or the trip to the bookstore.

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

Hallelujah!

I think this book was exactly what I needed. Coming over from the M$ world where everything is a GUI, the httpd.conf file was a bit frustrating. Apache's online documentation was not newbie friendly. This book bridges that gap. I liked the way they begin with NO conf file and explains the Apache errors, and how to fix it in the conf file. The book then goes on adding additional functionality and options.

This book does not explain every configuration option available to Apache, and it is a bit outdated (covers up to version 1.3.n). The book did come with a CD with sample conf files, but I found that I didn't even need to use them. The book is NOT a complete desktop reference, but it helped me understand Apache conf files so now the Apache online documentation makes sense.

This book showed me the ropes and I'm successfully running Apache as my web server, which is all I was trying to do.

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

Sorry to say so late in the game, but this is not a good book. I would say it is poorly written, but obviously the authors have not written most of it. Look at the manual pages for Apache 2.0.40 and you can easily see that most of the books content come from there.

By the way, there are no diagrams, figures, pictures or tables anywhere in the book!!!

I am still looking for a good book on Apache 2.0, but I guess I will just read the man pages.

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

Well, I would have ranked it higher, but the errors on pg. 62 are pretty egregious.

The book has name-based and ip-based virtual hosts backwards. It is very confusing to see this, but thankfully the unconfirmed user errata notes and the apache web site address the issue correctly and you can see clearly that the book is wrong on this point.

This sort of conceptual error should be fixed on reprints and in the confirmed errata section.

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

This book is to Apache what "Learning Perl" is to Perl.

It is NOT a reference guide as The Camel Book is to Perl. It is a book for someone who doesn't know about Apache and wants to set up a complex site from scratch. For this reason, it has a "storybook" approach as it walks through the installation and configuration of the increasingly complex requirements of a mythical web-site ("butterthlies.com" - I never got the joke).

Everything is eventually well-covered but an experienced user will have to keep checking the index to find the directive he's after.

By the way, I'd take issue with the reviewer who complained that the procedure for configuring network cards (p38) didn't work on his system. Actually, I was amazed they included this page at all. The book is supposed to be about Apache - getting your network running is really your own affair. As it stands, there is enough information on the page to give you some strong hints about how-to-install-a-network-card on any Unix system. The details vary so much among various Unix flavours (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux..) and even among distributions (Red Hat, SUSE, Caldera..) that it is asking a bit much to expect a page on each.

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

In general this was a pretty good book, though it struggled to keep the big picture in view a fair amount of the time (as in, why bother doing the things it describes). My biggest complaint is that in Chapter 5, page 124, it states, "Our salespeople are logging in because they want to place orders, and we ought to be able to detect who they are so we can send the goods to them automatically. This can be done, and we'll look at how to do it in a moment." And then it never describes how it can be done (or at least, I never found it. It goes on to talk about cookies and the like, but never mentions correlating logins to the cookies that are issued). Figuring out how to do this was my primary reason for getting the book!

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

I read the book from cover to cover, and now I'm attempting to go back and go through the examples. I have an immediate and perhaps major problem at page 38, section "Our Experimental Micro Web". It seems that the setup info on this page is going to be critical for much of what the rest of the book wants me to do, but it doesn't work on my Red-Hat Linux 6.1 machine. Nore is there much of a clue about what is supposed to happen. The problem is with the "ifconfig" program (which, by the way, is poorly documented in the Linux man page.) I can sort of guess what it's supposed to do, but there really should be a clear explanation. And since I can't get "ifconfig" to work with the same parameter list on my machine, I'm stuck.

It is not sufficient, in my opinion, to say "here's how it works on FreeBSD" when many of us are using different variants. This is too critical and cryptic a place to wave hands; the author should do the research for most popular Operating System variants, and provide enough explanation so that the remainin OS variants can be figured out. Bad spot to get lazy.

Comments about oreilly Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition:

A good book but I personally dislike the story-book approach where you have to read all the chapters in sequential order for things to make the best sense.

As an absolute beginners guide this is a valid strategy but not for anyone who already has set up a few sites.

Still well worth the cash but it would of been better if you could go to any chapter and not have to scratch your head about some reference (like a website name, machine name, or mock company name) used in an earlier chapter.