Ten years old but still awesome | Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

The lessons will last while the technology changes | Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing | Philip Greenspun

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	• Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing Philip Greenspun Morgan Kaufmann, 1999 - 608 pages average customer review:based on 233 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Beautiful Book

Philip Greenspun is the creator of photo.net and a very entertaining author as well. This a great book for beginners to get an overview of web publishing, online communities, and databases. Some of the specifics of the book are a little dated but the concepts are not. I often refer back to this book for ideas and inspiration. The online version of this book is free, but the print edition has great glossy pages and is packed with gratuitous, full-color pictures from Philip's image library.

Ten years old but still awesome

Greenspun has always annoyed me as being too arrogant and self-important. Maybe that's true, but I've been reading this book recently, and though some of the technologies are dated (well... except that we're all still using Unix/Linux and SQL, and fighting Microsoft and the banks), the philosophy is still right-on. The writing is sharp and funny. And every technical book in the world should have irrelevant-but-interesting photos of the world scattered through its pages. Sure, you can download a copy for free, but buying the real thing costs just a buck or two now, and it's a book that's fun to sit down with a paper copy of.

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The lessons will last while the technology changes

I thought I knew a lot about building good web sites, until I started reading this book. The author, Philip Greenspun is a professor of Computer Science at MIT and has built over 100 large-scale sites. The purpose of the book is twofold: to share the author's mistakes and successful strategies so that hopefully you don't have to make the same mistakes, and secondly, to emphasize how best to leverage the collaborative power of the Internet to provide services that were impossible or impractical before. Now I know how to properly engineer an RDBMS-backed site, how to build a personalization system, how to build an online community-based system (correctly), and how to build a content management system--and tie it to the personalization system. I have already incorporated many of the core concepts of the book into my own projects. This is the best web publishing book I have read to date.

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a breath of fresh air

Philip makes the material in this book freely available on the web and yet a book has never been more deserving of being bought. There are squillions of books on web development and yet here is one written by somebody with a fundamental and far reaching understanding of the state of play and the technology. Why, this guy even knows how to write. Enough said.

Collected (but a bit jumbled) wisdom of a web pundit

This book covers such a wide range of subjects - HTML, web design, SQL, server configuration, e-commerce, accepting credit cards, scalability, futurology, search engines, choosing a database, the nature of buying software, system admin and loads more, all in great depth - that it's almost impossible to characterize the contents. It's also packed full of beautiful, but completely unrelated, photographs; all taken by the author!

Philip Greenspun runs a successful web consultancy with several very busy sites, and seems to have tried to distill all that he has learned into one book. A lot of what he says is very wise, and although I disagree with some of his technology choices, he has thought everything through in great detail. There are quite a few sections which I will re-read and study for my own projects, but many others I will never bother with again. The book's main drawback is its size, which makes it hard to cherry-pick just the bits you need.

If you are looking for ways to use the latest technology to make a web site look cool, this is not the book for you. If you are building or running a site or business with lots of users, and you want to keep them and avoid going crazy in the process, you need this book. And the photos really are good.

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From the author's preface:

This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I've made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won't have to repeat those mistakes.

For the manager in charge of a Web publication or service, this book gives you the big picture. It is designed to help you to affirmatively make the high-level decisions that determine whether a site will be manageable or unmanageable, profitable or unprofitable, popular or unpopular, reliable or unreliable. I don't expect you to be down in the trenches typing Oracle SQL queries. But you'll learn enough from this book to decide whether in fact you need a database, whom to hire as the high database priest, and whom to allow anywhere near the database.

For the literate computer scientist, I hope to expose the beautiful possibilities in Web service design. I want to inspire you to believe that this is the most interesting and exciting area in which we can work.

For the working Web designer or programmer, I want to arm you with a new vocabulary and mental framework for building sites. There can be more to life than making a client's bad ideas flesh with PhotoShop and Perl/CGI.

For the users of the world, I document a comprehensive open-source approach to building online communities and show a collaborative Web-based way that we can dig ourselves out of our desktop application morass.

*Includes 200 photographs from Greenspun's highly successful photo.net Web site.
*Presents a general theory of the issues in Web Publishing.

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