Book Review:
Practical mod_perl
Author(s): | Stas Bekman & Eric Cholet |
---|---|
Publisher: | O'Reilly (2003) |
ISBN: | 0596002270 |
Web Site: | http://modperlbook.org/ |
Reviewer: | Dave Cross |
At almost 900 pages, this is certainly the biggest book on
mod_perl
that has been published so far. In my opinion it's
also one of the most useful.
Stas Bekman and Eric Cholet are two of the best-known and
(probably more importantly) most respected names in the mod_perl
community so you can be sure the the information you get in this book is
going to be top quality.
Part 1 of the book is about mod_perl
administration. It
starts with an overview of what mod_perl
is and how it relates
to CGI and the Apache web server before going into a chapter which gives
a quickstart guide to installing and using mod_perl
on some
of the most common platforms. Chapter three then goes back over the
installation process in far more detail. Chapter four explains how to
configure mod_perl
in various ways and chapter five cover
monitoring, upgrading and maintaining your mod_perl
enabled
web server. Chapter 6 is full of advice about how to write Perl code
that takes advantage of mod_perl
's features.
Part 2 is all about mod_perl
performance and contains
chapters about benchmarking and tuning your server. I found chapter twelve
to be particularly useful as it discusses a number of useful strategies
for splitting server load between a mod_perl
server for
dynmaic content and a "plain" (non-mod_perl
) server for
static content. Other chapters in this section cover other strategies
for improving performance by tuning Apache's configuration, changing
your Apache and mod_perl
build options and being cleverer
about the HTTP headers that you return.
Most dynamic web sites have a database involved somewhere so part 3
covers using databases with mod_perl
. Part 4 is all about
debugging and troubleshooting your mod_perl
server.
Finally, part 5 looks at what has changed with the release of the
forthcoming mod_perl 2.0
.
And this isn't just theoretical stuff. The two authors have been
involved in developing mod_perl
for a long time but they
are also mod_perl
users. You can just tell from the way
they write that the problems they discuss are problems they have dealt
with. This is the voice (or, rather, voices) of experience.
A lot of the text in the book is based on the mod_perl
guide which has been available on the web for some time, but all of the
content has been revisited, updated and expanded. This book is not really
in competition with books like The mod_perl
Developers
Cookbook or the older Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C
as those books largely concentrate on how to write code for
mod_perl
whereas the emphasis in this book is on configuring
and administering a mod_perl
server.
And if you are the administrator of a mod_perl
server then you should really consider adding this book to your
library.