Web Servers
Apache Cookbook
Format: Paperback
Author: Ken Coar
ReleaseDate: 14 November, 2003
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:
Excellent resource for web masters
Coar and Bowen provide an excellent pragmatic approach to taking care of common Apache administration tasks. I read this book about a year ago and recently re-read it. The Apache "recipes" are well organized, and presented with sufficient depth to be understandable for intermedia users.
The tips in the "miscellaneous topics" section and the troubleshooting guidelines are excellent, and will save Apache administrators significant amounts of time and frustration.
The good:
* Broad coverage of all tasks that Apache administrators will commonly encounter.
* Excellent writing style - concise yet sufficiently descriptive.
* Good organization of topics and very useful book index.
* Very good coverage of virtual hosts (required in most web hosting environments).
* Very appropriate "see also" references associated with each recipe.
The bad:
* Almost 25% of the book is taken up by installation, loading modules, and logging. These are good topics, but they take up too much of the book in my perspective.
* No information on the use of mod_python. mod_snake (a dead sourceforge) project is referenced. Blech.
* No information on co-hosting two versions of PHP (PHP4 and PHP5 on the same server).
Overall, this is a great book. If it had slightly better coverage on mod_python and mod_PHP I would give it five stars for certain.
Not beginner friendly 
This is a dissapointment for me, as I have normally always been very pleased with O'Reilly books. The kind of solutions this book gives are not aimed at someone like me, new and uncertain when it comes to linux.
Good accompaniment to other Apache books
There are enough examples in this book to cover pretty much everything you might need to do with Apache or get you started (along with the Apache documentation) if it isn't covered. As Cookbooks go, this on is fairly decent, although thinner than I expected.
Personally I think the first two chapters on installing Apache and adding modules are wasted space. Presumably by the time you're ready for this book, you've already got Apache installed on your servers and are just looking for ways to tweak it. I would have liked to see a section on SSI (Server side includes. . . does anybody use those anymore?) and maybe some more mod_rewrite stuff. This book will probably be most useful to novice and intermediate Apache administrators who are comfortable with messing around in httpd. conf, but need to refer back to the online docs now and then. Advanced Apache administrators probably won't find much new or useful in this book.
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