Apache Cookbook

by Ken Coar, Rich Bowen

Apache is far and away the most widely used web server platform in the world. Both free and rock-solid, it runs more than half of the world's web sites, ranging from huge e-commerce operations to corporate intranets and smaller hobby sites, and it continues to maintain its popularity, drawing new users all the time. If you work with Apache on a regular basis, you have plenty of documentation on installing and configuring your server, but where do you go for help with the day-to-day stuff, like adding common modules or fine-tuning your activity logging?The "Apache Cookbook" is a collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for webmasters, web administrators, programmers, and everyone else who works with Apache. For every problem addressed in the book, there's a worked-out solution or "recipe"--short, focused pieces of code that you can use immediately. But this book offers more than cut-and-paste code. You also get explanations of how and why the code works, so you can adapt the problem-solving techniques to similar situations.The recipes in the "Apache Cookbook" range from simple tasks, such installing the server on Red Hat Linux or Windows, to more complex tasks, such as setting up name-based virtual hosts or securing and managing your proxy server. The two hundred plus recipes in the book cover additional topics such as: SecurityAliases, Redirecting, and RewritingCGI Scripts, the suexec Wrapper, and other dynamic content techniquesError HandlingSSLPerformanceThe impressive collection of useful code in this book is a guaranteed timesaver for all Apache users, from novices to advanced practitioners. Instead of poking around mailing lists, online documentation, and other sources, you can rely on the "Apache Cookbook" for quick solutions to common problems, and then you can spend your time and energy where it matters most.

Genres: Reference, Technology, Technical, Web, Programming

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[nezgraba]

Unfortunately, most of the material is outdated.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm trying to go back and read through (completely) several books I bought way back in the day, especially those that I referenced a lot and also showed a lot of promise but maybe like the O'Reilly Cookbook books I only referred to certain recipes.

Having finished Apache Cookbook, a recipe book that I referenced quite a bit back in the day, my biggest gripe about the book was when Ken Coar referred to other maybe-not-ready-for-prime-time modules and web sites that now certain suffer from link rot, or possibly refers to things that certain were under development at the time. Lord knows I still run many Apache instances, and I still refer to many httpd.conf directives I learned a couple decades ago, but a lot of these recipes are just not great. Some are certainly dated, but others refer to my gripes above. Those that solidly refer to Apache directives that still hold true to this day are still meritorious, but others just don't make sense, even only a few years after this was published, let alone in 2023.

One may get something out of older editions of Apache Cookbook but so much has changed I'm not sure how much this book truly holds value for your serious modern Apache enthusiast.

One positive nostalgic thing is how much I wrote certain CGI in perl, used CPAN, and so on and so forth, and this book references a lot of that. Man, that takes me back. If nothing else, revisiting this book just recently is a big trip down memory lane.

[Eugene Mah · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Cookbooks go, this on is fairly decent, although thinner than I expected. 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.
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.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book if you are trying to learn Apache, but great if you ever have those "how do you do that" sorts of queries. It, for me, will be a jump point into greater research into items you need to know. I would love to leverage more caching abilities, and the ability to have Apache dump out POST contents is awesome in terms of possibly app troubleshooting..

[Gaurav Chaturvedi]

This book is exactly what it's title says. A cookbook with small recipes of kind to get you what you want out of apache.