Web Application Design and Implementation: Apache 2, PHP5, MySQL, JavaScript, and Linux/UNIX (Quantitative Software Engineering Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the book I wish I had had when I was starting to set up my Books-On-Line web site. Here in one simple step is just about half of what you need to know to set up a fairly complex database driven web site. I say about half of what you need to know because he spends no time at all on appearance, type fonts, color, illustrations, all that stuff. As he says in the introduction, he's not good at that (neither am I), and for those subjects you need another book.
But for a functioning web site he recommends what is sometimes called LAMP - for Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. To summarize why:
The software is FREE, a very good price.
It doesn't crash as often
It runs faster so you can use a slower computer.
By the time you finish, you'll probably want at least one book on each of these software packages, but here is an excellent place to start. It gives you enough to get started and you only need to go deeper into each of these packages when you start getting fancier. The nice thing about this book is that it gives you everything you need to get started in a well written, easy to understand way.
Mr. Gabarro, there are two things I would suggest for your next edition: One, include a cd of a working collection of the four packages rather than saying go get any distribution, and two, talk a little about past and emerging technologies such as Cold Fusion for the past, and Ruby on Rails for the future. I'd be interested in your opinions.

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Web Application Design and Implementation uses a hands-on approach of the major technologies and programming languages to teach readers web development. Providing an understanding of all major aspects of web programming in order to achieve the construction of a database-driven website, the book features state-of-the-art programming languages such as HTML, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP, Apache, Linux/Unix.

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Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time Review

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(More customer reviews)The answers aren't always simple and the multi-author nature of the book means that the structure is not straightforward, but the book contains most of the questions that Internet application developers and maintainers should ask themselves regarding operations, monitoring, backups, and scaling. The book pours cold water on one of my cherished ideas, i.e., build an Internet application as a relational database management system application and then add a thin HTML layer on top. But the authors and the experience of popular sites such as Facebook argue in favor of relegating the database to a very simple supporting role.

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A web application involves many specialists, but it takes people in web ops to ensure that everything works together throughout an application's lifetime. It's the expertise you need when your start-up gets an unexpected spike in web traffic, or when a new feature causes your mature application to fail. In this collection of essays and interviews, web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll offer insights into this evolving field. You'll learn stories from the trenches--from builders of some of the biggest sites on the Web--on what's necessary to help a site thrive.

Learn the skills needed in web operations, and why they're gained through experience rather than schooling
Understand why it's important to gather metrics from both your application and infrastructure
Consider common approaches to database architectures and the pitfalls that come with increasing scale
Learn how to handle the human side of outages and degradations
Find out how one company avoided disaster after a huge traffic deluge
Discover what went wrong after a problem occurs, and how to prevent it from happening again

Contributors include:

John Allspaw Heather Champ Michael Christian Richard Cook Alistair Croll Patrick Debois Eric Florenzano Paul Hammond Justin Huff Adam Jacob Jacob Loomis Matt Massie Brian Moon Anoop Nagwani Sean Power Eric Ries Theo Schlossnagle Baron Schwartz Andrew Shafer

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Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO Review

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(More customer reviews)Creating a website that can be found among all the other sites on the web has always been important to the success of any site. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is as important to the marketing of a website as image optimization is to its graphic design. For dynamic-driven websites such as BellaOnline, it is a continuous challenge to maintain search engine optimization. This book by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie is written for the PHP programmer who needs to understand the many technical issues involved when programming a search-engine-friendly site from attracting search engine spiders to site promotion. Throughout the book, you will find code examples and practice exercises which show how to implement the techniques covered in the book.
The authors begin with a discussion of the programming environment including setting up the MySQL server and then move on to tools and resources for the IT professional and the basics of search engine optimization. One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the URL. The URLs that you generate for your pages must not only be search engine friendly but also people friendly. The authors discuss how to make the task of creating and managing search-engine-friendly URLs easier. Another problem you will encounter is duplicate content which will harm your site's search engine rating. The authors discuss many ways to prevent or minimize this problem such as using robots.txt and meta exclusion.
Your site visitors enjoy those cool looking interactive features, such as fancy menus, that can be created using JavaScript, Ajax and Flash. These same features make it difficult for search engines to find your site. However, web readers have come to expect a certain amount of interactivity and without at least a few of these goodies, your site will be bland by today's standards. The authors discuss this problem and cover several ways to help such as generating SEO images and the use of graphic text.
One of the most popular ways to promote a website is with RSS feeds and syndication. To be effective, these feeds must be updated as new content is added to your site. This can be time consuming especially if your site is updated several times a minute. Two answers to this problem offered by the authors are to automate the generation of RSS feeds with a PHP class and displaying feeds with SimplePie.
A standard for a good search engine friendly site is a good sitemap system. As with RSS feeds, keeping a sitemap updated can be a challenge and the authors show you how to create a traditional and an XML-based sitemap. Once your site is live, your job as an IT professional has just begun. There are many SEO technical issues the authors touch on including maintaining your site, changing hosts and cross linking.
One thing that makes a technical-heavy book like this more helpful is a working example that incorporates what you have learned. The case study for this book is an E-commerce store and catalog. The authors have also covered how to enhance a pre-existing site to be more search engine friendly and how to create a search engine optimized blog using WordPress.
Jaimie Sirovich is a search engine marketing consultant, programmer and administrator for the search engine marketing blog SEOEgghead. Cristian Darie is a software engineer and author of several books and tutorials on AJAX, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. [...]

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Maybe you're a great programmer or IT professional, but marketing isn't your thing. Or perhaps you're a tech-savvy search engine marketer who wants a peek under the hood of a search engine optimized web site. Search engine marketing is a field where technology and marketing are both critical and interdependent, because small changes in the implementation of a web site can make you or break you in search engine rankings. Furthermore, the fusion of technology and marketing know-how can create web site features that attract more visitors.
The mission of this book is to help web developers create web sites that rank well with the major search engines, and to teach search engine marketers how to use technology to their advantage. We assert that neither marketing nor IT can exist in a vacuum, and it is essential that they not see themselves as opposing forces in an organization. They must work together. This book aims to educate both sides in that regard.

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Getting & Managing Your First 1,000 Clients In Web Hosting Review

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(More customer reviews)Since this is a new product on the market, I'm still working my way through it. These are my initial thoughts, which I will revise later:
The book does a phenomenal job of covering the scope of what someone new entering the hosting business would need to know. There's a lot of practical knowledge in these chapters: scripts, day-to-day operational procedures, marketing, and more. The author also has developed software that could be invaluable for the new host to use (not included with this book).
I've been in the hosting industry for 10 years and I still feel there are some items that are of value to me. Things that fall by the wayside such as local marketing in favor of online marketing.
That being said, I hope the author takes the time to address the two shortcomings of the book. First, I think the biggest hurdle of someone entering this highly saturated market is finding their niche. The author covers this in the book, however I think a future version of the book would benefit from this being expanded upon.
Secondly, it's obvious that the author's first language is not English. The book could really use a good editor to proofread. I think it unfairly undermines the effectiveness of the author, when it's clear he is a subject matter expert in the field.
I'm currently mentoring someone new to the industry and plan to use this book as a reference. I will update this review with the outcome of that effort.
Robert
[...]


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The guides brought to you in this book are gained by series of my own failures by doing things the wrong way. I hope by going through this guide book, you won't have to go through the same failures which I have experienced.By the end of this book, you should have all the necessary knowledge and hopefully passion to go and get your first 1,000 clients and to manage them, all by yourself.

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