Concise coverage, June 5, 2004 Reviewer: Wes Boudville (four out of five stars)

Harkness does a nice job of two things. First, in arguing persuasively that you should use Apache as your web server. They cite the massive installed base; the largest of any web server. The only major competitor is Microsoft's Internet Information Server. But IIS has been continuously riddled with bugs. Whereas for Apache, these are rare. Plus, the Apache open source community can respond within a few days to a discovered bug. With IIS, you are dependent on Microsoft's schedule for a patch.

The second reason offered by him takes up the bulk of the book. Namely, how to install and maintain it. But this is not a bulky book. As he shows, the Apache community has expended serious effort in making this as painless as possible. Even for the tyro sysadmin, if that happens to be you.

Harkness gives details on how to use Secure Sockets Layer, and making log files, for example. In the latter case, he doesn't seem to say explicitly, but the log files still are not the easiest thing to analyse, even with what Apache offers you. There are independent programs that do a neat job of analysing and summarising those files. But these are not part of Apache, and so outside the book's purview. The good news is that if you get to this point in your usage, you will be very familiar with Apache.