The Apache Modules Book: Application Development with Apache

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3 responses to “The Apache Modules Book: Application Development with Apache”

1. 

   I Feel Fine

   February 1, 2014

   21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

   
   Consistent, well-written, but a bit gap toothed, November 25, 2007

   By 

   I Feel Fine (San Diego CA) –

   This review is from: The Apache Modules Book: Application Development with Apache (Paperback)

   This book easily earns five stars despite a few glaring issues. Why? It’s the best, most consitent, and approachable guide you’ll find to writing Apache modules.

   I spent two weeks scouring the net for APR examples and explanations. I started with the O’Reilly books only to find they are incredibly out of date. I moved on to Apache sanctioned module source code. I dissected source code for other modules only to find that the examples fluctuated on approach and, apparently, on the author’s grasp of the entire APR libraries. Some folks wrote against previous APR version libraries and macros. Others used the updated APR. Still others rolled their own versions of functions that were already written, just not discovered. Tutorials varied in reliability with similar issues. And my desk quickly filled with highlighted and sticky-noted annotated examples.

   This book replaced all those loose inconsistent notes with a solid example-centric nicely bound guide. Five stars. Just for that.

   This book is not without problems though. First, it makes reference to programming paradigms which, frankly, I’ve never heard of before and which this book inadequately explains. Brigade buckets is an example. Bridage buckets are incrementally explained as a ring data store (eh?), a doubly linked list (okay, firm ground), and then a mechanism for passing data through layered IO (another eh?). I couldn’t get much from the explanation. Googling “brigade bucket” led to IEEE DSP circuit design and a heated debate on using solid state delay effects for guitar pedals. Apparently brigade buckets don’t quote share the same prolific status as, say, something more Knuth-ess.

   The book explained thread safety in a similarly gap toothed summary. It offers this fatherly advice: avoid shared memory and make sure functions are reentrant. That wasn’t much help for me. I’d prefer to have a detailed explanation of why the APR libraries have both reentrant and non-reentrant versions of the same functions. Wouldn’t any reasonable programmer always use the reentrant version? If not, I’d like to know why… with some precision.

   The final gripe: the book includes RFC 2616 in it’s entirety. This needlessly adds 200 pages of non-original and otherwise easily (and FREEly) accessibe volume. Granted, the publisher formatted the RFC nicely. It’s a bit easier to read than the fixed format of the real RFC. But why not add a few notes? The author could have taken the edge off of the RFC-legalese and made it a bit more approachable (think learning bible with more notes than text). At the risk of discouraging future books of this level, the RFC is a blatant copout and just a really disgusting way of bumping page numbers.

   So, those are the issues I had. I’m still giving this a solid five as it outshines any other information I’ve found to date.

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2. 

   D. Gentry

   February 1, 2014

   8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

   
   The definitive source for Apache module writers, August 27, 2007

   By 

   D. Gentry (Fremont, CA USA) –
   
     

   This review is from: The Apache Modules Book: Application Development with Apache (Paperback)

   I tried to write an Apache module using only the documentation and reference material available on the net, and failed. The documentation you can find on the net (even on Apache.org’s own website) is either completely out of date or maddeningly vague. If you spend enough time in trial and error you might get your module to work. Then again, you might not.

   If you’re trying to write or maintain an Apache module, this book is an invaluable tutorial and resource. It saved me a great deal of time and frustration.

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3. 

   Anthony Lawrence “Unixish stuff”

   February 1, 2014

   10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

   
   I was surprised, March 9, 2007

   By 

   Anthony Lawrence “Unixish stuff” (Middleboro, MA USA) –
   
     
   
     

   This review is from: The Apache Modules Book: Application Development with Apache (Paperback)

   I was (pleasantly) surprised by this.

   I drive my website with Perl cgi scripts – basically a home grown CMS that gives me the control I want. I’d never thought much about the inner workings of the modules I do use, and certainly never thought that I could replace a tremendous amount of my cgi Perl code with a direct module. But after reading this, I realized it wouldn’t be all that hard to do.

   Now it is true that I haven’t done much with C for a long, long time. In spite of that, I feel reasonably confident that I could extend the examples given in Nick’s book to do exactly what I need much more quickly and efficiently – sure, there are higher level tasks that might be more than I could tackle, but the basics seem quite easy and attainable.

   Well written, easy to follow (and downloadable) examples, and at least as far as I can tell, quite comprehensive. Good job!

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