Apache Cookbook Author: Ken Coar & Rich Bowen Pages: 234 Publisher: O'Reilly ISBN: 0-596-00191-6 Review Date: 7 Feb 2004 Summary: An excellent quick-start, launch-pad-style guide for performing a plethora of common Apache administrative tasks.

The Apache web server powers a great deal of the World Wide Web these days, With its high level of flexibility, customizability, ease of acquisition, and low cost, it's easy to see why it has become the most widely used web server on the planet. But such flexibility also brings hand-in-hand with it a great deal of complexity. O'Reilly's Apache Cookbook offers solutions to a wide range of problems that just about anyone who works with Apache will face at one time or another and proves to be a welcome companion to any traveler journeying along the path of Apache administration.

The Cookbook is a large collection of brief recipes, each addressing a particular aspect of Apache web server administration, from installation and configuration, to virtual hosting, security, proxying, and more. Each recipe states a particular problem to overcome, a set of one or more solutions to solve the problem in question, some discussion related to the problem and solution(s), and in many cases a list of other resources that can be consulted for further information.

A full listing of the recipes offered can be found in the table of contents provided on the Book's website.

With much of the Apache world at the time of this writing in flux between the sturdy 1.3 series, and the newer, very promising, 2.x series, the authors are very helpful to often point out what features are available in which versions, and the configuration differences between the two.

As I started out reading the Cookbook I was a bit put off with the brevity of each recipe provided. I was accustomed to the much more lengthy coverage in O'Reilly's Cookbook series, such as the Perl Cookbook. But as time has passed, and as I've read through the book, the brief format of each recipe has grown on me, and I find the book strangely appealing and useful, despite this brevity.

Perhaps part of this growing fondness of the book has to do with a couple of related articles on the O'Reilly network where co-author Rich Bowen, a little bit tongue in cheek, I think, offers solutions to a few of the common questions fielded daily in the #apache channel on the irc.freenode.net IRC network. From the context of what Ken has to put up with on a daily basis on #apache from the volume of newby questions, I can appreciate the brevity with which he approaches each recipe in the cookbook.

But on the other hand I worry that a book like this promotes what I call 'Cookbook Computing', which can be both useful, and detrimental, depending on how you look at it. One one side of the coin, a book like this is very useful for experienced administrators, who simply need to be pointed in the right (or best) direction to solve a particular task, and they can then, given the benefit of their experience, handle the rest of the details without too much trouble. On the other side though, I can see a book like this being detrimental to the newby, who can come to rely on the spoon-fed, 'just give me the answer and don't make me use the grey matter in my head' answers, without taking the time to fully understand what's going on beneath the hood. At the same time, however, the book is useful to the newby in pointing them down the right path, and giving them to a few documents to peruse to make sure their coming journey is more pleasant. As with so many areas in life, whether or not we can come to rely upon ourselves and think through problems, is a decision to be made by each individual.

So, perhaps then, the main charm of the Apache Cookbook lies in that it serves as a sturdy, reliable signpost, pointing out the best, and most commonly-accepted ways to address the numerous administration hurdles covered in the book, as well as where to look should you need further guidance, without a lot of superflous information. As an Apache admin myself, I anticipate consulting its pages on a regular basis in the forseeable future.

Overall Rating: 8/10