Reviews for The Apache Modules Book: Application Development with Apache (Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development)

1. Excellent

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12rd, 2008

   This book is perhaps one of the few books that details both programming in UNIX and programming for Apache. The book covers network and concurrency programming in Apache and points out a number of routes that an author might mistakenly travel and how the Apache framework probably handles this already in a much safer manner.
   
   I am amazed at how often I pick up this book.
   
   It would be great if a book could be written to accompany the APR also.

2. Looking forward to the second edition

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2007

   I don't like to cane books, but this one is hardly deserving of the word comprehensive. Yes, it IS the only "Guide to Developing Apache 2.x Modules and Applications" in print. But that's about it as far as correct advertising goes.
   
   I've been attempting to develop a module using this book as a guide. I've discovered that in actual fact I use this book about 10%, and the online manuals for Apache and APR about 70%, and have to dig into the APR source code the remaining 20% of the time.
   
   First the positive points: this book opens the reader to the possibilities of Apache and the power of writing custom modules. It allows one to genuinely feel excited about the improvements and extensibility of the v2.0+ generation of Apache.
   
   So what's missing in this book? Well for starters, how to configure a module. Plenty of time is spent on per-directory configurations, but nowhere is configuring on a per-server level covered. Threading and thread safety is barely touched on yet is a significant part of the core APR API. Resource lists seem pretty useful when maintaining persistent connections to services from a module, but again are briefly touched on and nowhere (in the book or in the online API documentation) is there a comment to let you know that the reslist implementation has thread protection built in.
   
   What about basic Apache concepts like buckets? I still feel confused. Some things are covered reasonably well, like memory pools, but most other topics are glossed over.
   
   I guess this book is mainly a pointer to the Apache source code. Don't think that this book is enough to get you writing modules, it's not.
   
   If I had my way, Appendix C (a copy of RFC2068) would be removed, the organisation of topics in the book would be re-thought, more time and detail would be spend on explaining the API (the online documentation merely details function calls but not how to use them) with more attention on common tasks (configuration, threading, etc). More diagrams, more detail. I'm not sure but I'm guessing a more adequate book would be perhaps twice the size.
   
   Having said all that, something is better than nothing. It could be much better though!