How to Set-Up and Maintain a Web Site (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: It is an excellent book
Review: Anyone who is interested in how the internet works has to buy this book. Although it is not an easy book, most people would benefit from reading it if they can understand 70% material in this book. I suggest guys can skip the UNIX web server if they are not familiar with UNIX. The later part that decribes how perl, java, or cgi work is excellent. I give this book 100 points. If you are the one who is serious with your web site, buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: broad, not deep, content
Review: Great book if you're new to website administration and design. Contains crash courses in how the Web works, server admin, security, HTML, multimedia, and server-side scripting. Focused towards Unix/Perl with little or no coverage of commercial and newer products like Microsoft IIS/ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, etc. Recommended for newbies.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book but out of date(1997)
Review: I came here to see if there was a new edition of this book. I learned my trade as a web developer/web master from this book. But that was a while ago, and the landscape is just enormously different then when this book was written. Lincoln Stein is a perl/bioinformatics god. But this book should either go out of print, or write a second edition.

Rating:
Summary: A great how-to book for web builders
Review: I think this is a great primer on how to set up a web site. Not so much on maintaining a site, but there is pretty much everything you need to know -- except new stuff that has emerged over the last 18 months -- to set up a real web site. The book covers server hardware and software as well as web security, scripting, etc. Very easy to read, although the sections on scripting and Java require some programming knowledge.

I hope Mssr. Stein updates this book. I took out a copy of the 2nd edition from the school library. If he comes out with a new edition soon, I'm gonna buy it.

Rating:
Summary: You MUST Get this Book
Review: Lincoln Stein is basically THE guru of web site security. That makes this book, on setting up a web site, stand out from the rest. Heard about the recent attacks that brought down commercial giants' web sites? That's why the foundation of your approach should be sound engineering, with the bells and whistles added later.

Okay, sorry for the sermon. The fact is that this book discusses EVERY topic related to the world wide web. It gives a broad understanding, plenty of detail, and a lot of wisdom as well. I disagree with folks who suggest it is ``out of date''; it still provides the perfect foundation for anybody who is going to build a web site (or wants to know how they work).

If you want to use technology that isn't mentioned in this book, go ahead and get another book on that. But those are just details--this book is the bedrock and foundation. Don't hit the infobahn without it.

Rating:
Summary: CD-ROM & File Uploads
Review: The key feature of this second edition is the CD-ROM -- which is chock-full of tools like CGI & Perl 5 Script libraries, WWW servers, HTML editors, Java applets and much more. People have bought this book just for the informatin on the CD-ROM alone, but the book is also a must-have for any web designer's shelf -- it features step-by-step explanations, experience-based guidance and follows every stage of the creating a web page process. Reviewers mentioned that the coverage of file uploads is a great addition. Some other changes to the first edition, _How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site_, are the coverage of HTML 3.2, Java, JavaScript, CGI & Perl 5, and VRML.


Rating:
Summary: Decent book - some useful stuff - some not very useful
Review: This book tries to cover everything but just doesn't do that great a job of it. Lots of information on Apache and other Unix type data but virtually no reference of IIS.

It starts by giving the basic background info but some of this is pretty indepth which most poeple won't understand or want to know about how the internet works. Then moves to web servers with a lot of info on Apache for Unix, a decent coverage of Website for 95/NT (although I never heard of website - seems to be similar to Personal Web Server but it's not the same), and covers breifly WebStar for the Mac. This covers 150 pages but if you only deal with one system you can skip 100 pages here. It give examples of controlling access to the site using good screen shots of dialogs.

Then it jumps to creating web sites (fairly decent job but other books are better). There is also a lot of practical information about web site development that many people just don't realize which is included. It does a great job of listing numerous free apps to help out in creating html items and converters between differently formatted docs. The apps are listed by web site and email address - I didn't verify any of them so who knows how many are out of date by now.

Finally it finishes by covering CGI, Javascript (pretty well but again other books are better and more in depth) and Java applets - not how to program in Java. No mention of VBscript. Numerous problems in examples (especially with added spaces in code) cause confusion - whoever edited this obviously doesn't program.

Overall not a bad semi-starter for someone new who need to administer a web site and must deal with the software to control access and data. It's definitely not a programming book and because it tries to cover both Unix and NT (and a little Mac) I ended up skimming 20-40 page sections of stuff at a time that I wasn't interested in. 750 pages but about 200 really proved useful (mainly because there are better references for some topics covered like CGI, Javascript, and HTML). However I did really like the listing of tools to covert data and apps to help with site development.