Book Review: Apache Cookbook
ByI was expecting to learn a little about Native American cuisine when I ordered Apache Cookbook, 2nd ed., by Ken Coar and Rich Bowen. I was disappointed in that respect, but I still found ample material to digest…
On a more serious note, I enjoyed reading this book and I learn a lot of new information about the Apache web server. I usually enjoy reading code cookbooks because their layout and organization facilitates skipping what you already know and getting onto things you don’t. I would consider myself an intermediate level Apache administrator, and I was able to get through the entire book in a single evening. I made notes on some of the recipes I found most interesting, and that I’m actually going to try implementing. I’ll list some of them here so you can get an idea what kinds of things you might learn if you read this book:
- Recipe 3.19 – Logging activity to a MySQL database
- Recipe 5.16 – Redirecting all- or part- of your server to SSL
- Recipe 5.17 – Turning Directories in to Hostnames
- Recipe 5.22 – Turning URL segments into Query Arguments
- Recipe 6.21 – Protecting files with a wrapper
- Recipe 6.33 – Using permanent redirects to obscure forbidden URLs
- Recipe 10.9 – Load balancing with mod_proxy_balancer
- Recipe 11.2 – Benchmarking Apache with ab
These were the topics that interested me most, but there are quite a few others that I’d like to play around with when I’ve got more time. Intermediate users can definitely skip the first 2 chapters which covers installing Apache on a number of platforms, and enabling certain mods. I highly recommend chapter 5: Aliases, Redirecting and Rewriting, that was one area I am particularly weak in and was able to get a lot of information out of it. Also helpful was Appendix A, which gives a concise refresher on regular expressions for those of you like me, who re-learn regular expressions every time you need one.
Overall I highly recommend this book. It’s not as comprehensive or as in depth as others I’ve browsed, but it is definitely dense with useful information about stuff you either didn’t know you could do with Apache, or weren’t quite sure how to do it.
