Helpful, but questionable...

This book reads like a journal of somebody who has never configured a web server at all, literally saying things like, "We tried this, and we got this error message". While the author is trying to create a noob friendly book here, it comes off like it was written by noobs (which probably isn't actually the case).

There are also some questionable things, for example, they create a shell script that must run in a particular directory. They actually say "you must cd to the directory first" and then use the shell built-in 'pwd' instead of the dot operator for the current directory -- twice on one line! This comes off as pretty noobish to me. In the old days, this would cause 300,000 lines of kernel code to execute an external program and return, but at least the shell implements pwd as a builtin these days. Still, it was one of those small things that makes you wonder about a book...

Despite this, the book IS useful for a noob to learn some Apache basics and make the conf files more readable. I had a 10 year old Apache Bible with Y2K material in it that in some ways was more helpful. Still, I am still reading the relevant sections and the book is helping me get a task done at work.

Other Reviews

• Apache - book review
• Helpful, but questionable...
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• This book is not a tutorial.
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