Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, by MIT veteran Philip Greenspun, is both broadly conceptual and deeply technical, and it assumes that the reader is willing to think seriously about the challenge of building a content site, a community site, or an e-commerce store before plunging in.
Book Description
This isn’t another cookie-recipe approach to planning a successful Web site. Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, by MIT veteran Philip Greenspun, is both broadly conceptual and deeply technical, and it assumes that the reader is willing to think seriously about the challenge of building a content site, a community site, or an e-commerce store before plunging in.
Although heavily Unix-oriented, it does not set out to proselytize a product, or even suggest that there is only one way to solve certain technical challenges. Rather, it encourages the reader to think about Web content and functionality as something designed to help visitors answer questions or do something useful. This may sound nebulous, but his observations about why Web sites go bad are illustrated with many well-chosen examples.
The core of the book is quite technical. Three long sections on publishing, community, and e-commerce architectures are illustrated by the author’s data models and working open-source systems, so someone with C, SQL, and a good understanding of Internet Protocol (IP) under his or her belt will get the most out of the discussion. Such technical readers will find numerous Web addresses and other citations for further technical information. The author also invites readers to use his code if appropriate.
Table of Contents
- Envisioning a site that won’t be featured in suck.com
- So you want to join the world’s grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs
- Scalable systems for on-line communities
- Static site development
- Learn to program HTML in 21 minutes
- Adding images to your site
- Publicizing your site
- So you want to run your own server
- User tracking
- Sites that are really programs
- Sites that are really databases
- Database management systems
- Interfacing a relational database to the Web
- ecommerce
- Case studies
- Better living through chemistry
- A future so bright you’ll need to wear sunglasses