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Summary: philg is god, and his book is great
Review: phillip's book is funny, easy to read, and insightful. it delivers superior technical advice and philosophy on web publishing, and I'm surprised that the whole world isn't buying this book by the truckload. advice: buy it, whether you're an idiot or a genius.
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Summary: The best book that puts it all together
Review: I'm indebted to this book, because I badly needed one, single, book which covered this wide area of Websites, good design, usability, back-end technology, and a whole lot else. This is the only book I know that fits the bill. The author's writing style is unusual. The book reads like a lecture rather than a book. It is conversational, and the prose therefore is a little less tightly structured and focused than most classic texts I've read. The author chooses to digress into his pet peeves every now and then, but his peeves make interesting reading. If you are expecting a "great" book, with a style similar to the Unix classics, e.g. Kernighan and Ritchie's book on C, then you won't get it here. But Greenspun's style is perhaps more appropriate for the unstructured and extensive subject area he attempts to cover. He covers Websites to begin with, and what makes Websites usable. He then moves on to interactive Websites and the technologies behind them. Finally, he covers implementation details, including database systems, scripting languages, and all sorts of other hands-on areas. One impression that I came away with is that Greenspun is a good engineer. His sense of good engineering elegance is extremely rare, and this sense is visible all through the book. I agree with his choices of technology, and in particular, his reasons for choosing them. An unusual choice is his preference for Tcl as a scripting language over Perl. I feel that his book would have allowed more readers to relate to his examples if he had used Perl, which I suspect is more popular than Tcl, at least in the Web scripting world. Similarly, his choice of AOLServer + Tcl leaves one wishing that he had covered Apache + mod_perl in as much depth. His coverage of issues like rationale behind choosing one DBMS over another, is really rare. I wouldn't say his treatment is systematic or exhaustive, but no other book I have read even attempts to address these issues from the practitioner's viewpoint the way he does. And the descriptions of his experiences with Cybercash, server downtime, etc., are superb. This book is in a class by itself. Having handled Web application development since 1995, I felt I had found a kindred soul. I am using this book as required reading for a course on Web Technology for Information Management majors, which I teach, in a management institute in Bombay. I will also make it required reading in the software development firm which I manage... especially for the managers. :)
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Summary: Philip comes clean
Review: Most technical books cover their topic in detail but fail to provide a proper context, to explain how it fits in the larger picture. Philip covers the menusha of web publishing from graphics processing to building database driven websites in a conversational style that makes it easy to see how all the pieces fit together. I don't understand the coffee table format (the photos are random) but it's not distracting either. Chock full of good, practical advice that is hard to find anywhere else.
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Summary: Good book despite rants
Review: An excellent book for getting started with all aspects of web publishing and setting up web sites. The author takes a relatively dry topic and maakes it very entertaining. This book is geared towards the relative novice and if you have even moderate experience in this, the book tends to drag at times. One major caveat, the author has very strong feelings and states many opinions as if they were facts. Take EVERYTHING that he says with a grain of salt. There are many things that he says that I don't agree with (are wrong!) and after he rants on about them for pages and pages, even I begin to doubt myself.
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Summary: DamnThisIsAGoodBookAboutWebPublishing
Review: ...I made quick work of reading it cover to cover over easterweekend. Saying "I couldn't put it down" is a cliche for afiction book -- but almost unheard of for a non-fiction, technicalbook such as this. What makes this book so damn good is the author (Duh!). He doesn't drone on endlessly about the nuts and bolts of web publishing. Instead, he covers the things that you will never find in ANY other web publishing book on this earth: How to make your web site usable and functional. Previous to reading this book, I'd never have entertained the thought that a programmer could design a decent web site. I was wrong. Greenspun (the author) can make one hell of a good website... What you will find in this book, which you will find in no other web design book are: 1. how to make a website with an intuitive user interface that won't leave users searching to the "back" button in their browser. 2. how to make scalable web sites that don't take 80 hours a week to maintain. 3. how to add collaboration to your website (ex: user comments, user submitted links) 4. how to lay the foundation for a world class website. 5. how to avoid repeating the mistakes of other web sites. Read this book as a first course in web design, no matter if you make $100,000 a year doing design, or aspire to make $100,00 in web design.
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Summary: Great companion website at photo.net/wtr/thebook
Review: I don't have the hardcopy of this book (I read it on the web at photo.net/wtr/thebook/), but maybe I'll go out and buy one. It really is wonderful. Philip has revised some sections of the book on the website, so be sure to check it out.
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Summary: A Gen-yew-wine book, by a real live person.
Review: Unlike most of the computer press, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing is a real book written by a stand-up human being, with the inspiration, apparently, of his beloved dog. His opinions are pungent and well informed, his biases out front and expert. A former mathematician and engineer, now a programmer, lecuturer and businessman, Greenspun is a first rate intelligence, not some free-lancer working off his advance from the wide-margin thick-paper computer book publishers. An excellent book for anyone actually working in web publishing. a sound piece of insurance for anybody hiring or buying in the field.
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Summary: I laughed, I cried, I learned about web publishing
Review: This is an excellent reference on many levels. Some of the content is practical advice and instruction on a range of technical issues, from how to write basic HTML to recommended database disk configuration to reviews of web server software, programming languages, and operating systems. This is useful, and most books leave off here and call it a day. At another level, this provides excellent advice and commentary about the problems and challenges in web publishing. These include ecommerce, choosing web servers/database software, security and data models. This covers an unusually wide range of products within each category, much of which is based on Greenspun's (sometimes painful) experiences. These experiences are made more tragic since nobody else seems to learn from them. Handspring could have learned a thing or two from the ecommerce chapter. More broadly, this book addresses why you would want to build a web site in the first place, what sorts of things you should do and what sorts of things you should let users do. Greenspun makes an excellent case for when you might want to build collaborative sites/database, and provides open source tools for doing so. The oft-neglected concept of giving back is a common theme throughout the book. I suspect there are few authors who could write intelligently about such a broad range of topics and provide such diverse examples of both successes and failures. This is certainly the most complete guide to web publishing, and is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in web publishing.
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Summary: Tells you the "WHY" behind creating web pages
Review: This book isn't your typical technical manual, so you won't learn how to code in HTML or Java from this. What you WILL learn is a philosophy about the power that on-line publishing has over traditional publishing methods, and a rough sketch as to how to go about implementing them. At the core is the thesis that vistors to your website should not only be able to glean information but also add content to your website, thus creating a dynamic site that people will want to visit time and time again. The guide has an emphasis on people who have access to their own servers, so those of you looking to create a page on Geocities will not find this book very useful. In particular, you will want to have script-writing abilities and access to a database; database-backed websites are a core tenet to his thesis. Many of his examples use the TCL-based AOLserver and the Oracle database, although other solutions are explored as well. An amateur photographer, Mr. Greenspun has peppered the book with many of his photographs, usually not relevant to the material but making the book a little more delightful to skim than your typical O'Reilly "animal" manual. In short, if you are serious about creating web pages, whether it be for personal or business use, you should read this book first. I guarantee it will change the way you view webpage creation.
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Summary: The best book I bought last year
Review: _Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing_ is everything that most computer books are not: it is well-written, well-organized, thought through thoroughly, funny, opinionated, beautifully laid out, beautifully illustrated, and, best of all, it will not be obsolete in three years. Anyone who is interested in database-backed Web sites (especially people who are not experienced with RDBMS) owes it to himself to take a look at this book. I've read it cover-to-cover twice: the first time to get a sense of the subject (and to be entertained), the second time to learn how to get started. Even though I'm using MySQL/PHP&Cold Fusion/Apache rather than the Oracle/AOLServer combination that Greenspun recommends and focuses on, about 90% of his book is still relevant to what I am doing. This is the best book I have bought in a long time, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
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