Embedding Perl in HTML With Mason

Perl Best Practices

Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

Perl Cookbook, Second Edition

Perl Books

Practical mod_perl

Format: Paperback
Author: Stas Bekman
ReleaseDate: May, 2003
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

As the title suggests
It starts with a lot of information on how apache works and how mod_perl and other modules intract. This is very practical. Then, after learning that information, it shows how you can use the knowledge to signficiantly improve the performance of your mod_perl apps.

In addition, it gives valuable advice on how to troubleshoot fustrating issues with mod_perl & apache.

This book should be required reading for anybody doing mod_perl work.

mod_perl from the horse's mouth
It pretty much covers all bases: from porting existing CGI scripts to mod_perl, to architecturing busy websites for optimal performance. This one of the most informative O'Relly books by absolute metrics: almost 1000 pages packed with useful information. One of the authors, Stas Bekman, works on mod_perl full-time, so this is it's basically as authoriative as it gets.

The only drawback of this book that I noticed is that it sometimes gets too heavy on basic Perl or sysadmin stuff, making the experienced developer flip pages in anxiety. Also, some parts are too similar to online mod_perl documentation (which is not surprising as it's written by the same person).

Still, this is the first book with substantial mod_perl2 coverage, and probably worths buying for this reason alone. All in all, if you're coding mod_perl for living, I think you owe it to yourself to have this book in your O'Relly collection.

Definitive guide to mod_perl administration
In my opinion it's also one of the most useful. At almost 900 pages, this is certainly the biggest book on mod_perl that has been published so far.

Stas Bekman and Eric Cholet are two of the best-known and (probably more importantly) most respected names in the mod_perl community so you can be sure the the information you get in this book is going to be top quality.

Part 1 of the book is about mod_perl administration. It starts with an overview of what mod_perl is and how it relates to CGI and the Apache web server before going into a chapter which gives a quickstart guide to installing and using mod_perl on some of the most common platforms. Chapter three then goes back over the installation process in far more detail. Chapter four explains how to configure mod_perl in various ways and chapter five cover monitoring, upgrading and maintaining your mod_perl enabled web server. Chapter 6 is full of advice about how to write Perl code that takes advantage of mod_perl's features.

Part 2 is all about mod_perl performance and contains chapters about benchmarking and tuning your server. I found chapter twelve to be particularly useful as it discusses a number of useful strategies for splitting server load between a mod_perl server for dynmaic content and a "plain" (non-mod_perl) server for static content. Other chapters in this section cover other strategies for improving performance by tuning Apache's configuration, changing your Apache and mod_perl build options and being cleverer about the HTTP headers that you return.

Most dynamic web sites have a database involved somewhere so part 3 covers using databases with mod_perl. Part 4 is all about debugging and troubleshooting your mod_perl server. Finally, part 5 looks at what has changed with the release of the forthcoming mod_perl 2. 0.

And this isn't just theoretical stuff. The two authors have been involved in developing mod_perl for a long time but they are also mod_perl users. You can just tell from the way they write that the problems they discuss are problems they have dealt with. This is the voice (or, rather, voices) of experience.

A lot of the text in the book is based on the mode_perl guide which has been available on the web for some time, but all of the content has been revisited, updated and expanded. This book is not really in competition with books like The mod_perl Developers Cookbook or the older Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C as those books largely concentrate on how to write code for mod_perl whereas the emphasis in this book is on configuring and administering a mod_perl server.

And if you are the administrator of a mod_perl server then you should really consider adding this book to your library.