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Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
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Author: Philip Greenspun
List Price: $47.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1558605347
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (April, 1999)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 5,585
Average Customer Rating: 4.72 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 4 out of 5
Collected (but a bit jumbled) wisdom of a web pundit
This book covers such a wide range of subjects - HTML, web design, SQL, server configuration, e-commerce, accepting credit cards, scalability, futurology, search engines, choosing a database, the nature of buying software, system admin and loads more, all in great depth - that it's almost impossible to characterize the contents. It's also packed full of beautiful, but completely unrelated, photographs; all taken by the author!Philip Greenspun runs a successful web consultancy with several very busy sites, and seems to have tried to distill all that he has learned into one book. A lot of what he says is very wise, and although I disagree with some of his technology choices, he has thought everything through in great detail. There are quite a few sections which I will re-read and study for my own projects, but many others I will never bother with again. The book's main drawback is its size, which makes it hard to cherry-pick just the bits you need. If you are looking for ways to use the latest technology to make a web site look cool, this is not the book for you. If you are building or running a site or business with lots of users, and you want to keep them and avoid going crazy in the process, you need this book. And the photos really are good.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Still the book to recommend
It's interesting how a lot of readers complain about the book being all about Phil's ego and Arsdigita,(the company he created that is now part of redhat). It seems those people didn't understand much of the book or found the subject disappointingly tougher than they thought... Yes, web publishing requires more intelligence and thoughfullness some would like to believe. And this book makes you realise that, whether 1998 or 2002.
Most web sites that are data driven these days still use the same principles explained in this book. Most don't use the ACS but the whole idea behind the ACS is one that comes from a sincere desire to facilitate the creation of dynamic (data driven) web sites.
One can tell Greenspun is more than a technologist, but a humanist as well. This would explain the appearance of the book some like to critisize. Certainly Greenspun ego is present, but what can you expect from someone who's got a vast array of knowledge and wisdom to share. Definitely a book any intelligent person will love.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what it takes to create web services. Also, this book is the perfect reference for teaching a class on website development, in a manner that gives students a broad perspective before they delve into the inevitable geek stuff: web application programming, data models, and SQL queries. I've used this book at work to educate some of my cooworkers who were programmers or designers, and to give clients instructive lectures on the subject.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Not bad, but woefully outdated
Let's face it folks, this book was already outdated when it came out in 1999 and today it's even worse. The book *does* provide a good high-level discussion of how this stuff works (like you'd expect from an MIT prof), highly recommended for the utter novice. For everyone else, I'd pass until we see an updated version with less Microsoft bashing and even less demagoguery. But if you want a good history lesson, go for it!
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