The Apache Module Book

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• Nick Kew
• Prentice Hall
• 9780132409674

Order (or just read more about) The Apache Module Book  from Amazon.com

Aaargh.. C code. I never thought I'd say that, but there it is. I must be getting old..

Oh well, at least I can still read it. And this book did open my eyes to the inner workings of Apache - I had really never thought much about any of this before. As simple examples are presented, I was tempted to try them out (you can download from http://www.apachetutor.org). Actually, as I looked at those, I realized that many of the things I do with Perl could be accomplished directly wih a custom module, which of course would have far less overhead and would run considerably quicker. Sucked in by that, I looked deeper and thought that most of what I'm doing wouldn't give me any real headaches in C (heck, I'm rusty but not completely locked up yet). So..

So I futzed around a bit. Nick's book is easy to follow and the examples he uses are really simple frameworks that I could easily extend to the functionality I really need. I may never get to the point of actually replacing all my current cgi scripts with a module, but it is eye opening to realize that I actually could.

That surprised me a bit. I don't mean to trivialize this at all, and there are plenty of things to be concerned about in more complex modules (Nick does cover the "gotcha's" and all that), but I didn't expect that useful functionality would be this easy to obtain.. might even be fun!

Well written, easy to follow, seems comprehensive to me. You will need at least read-only comfort with C and of course would need a bit more to actually implement this stuff.

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