setting up lamp
At the moment, don't buy this book. The reason: what is otherwise an excellent book cannot be followed, because the essential steps it takes you through require resources that are not available - ie. the web resources no longer exist. Time is money, and after spending another long day yesterday, running into one dead end after another, one failed work around after another, this book has cost me lots, and I've not achieved anywhere near Setting Up Lamp. The authors/publisher could correct this easily enough, by providing the info on their website. If these issues are corrected, the book is likely to rate differently. Until that time, invest elsewhere.
Good information but outdated
This book was probably great a couple of years ago. It has great step-by-step instructions, and it walks you through things in a very detailed manner.
However, since the versions of all software (and the OS) used in the book have been updated at least a few times since 2004, I ran into several issues. Maybe 10% of all the links are accurate (which you need to install the .rpm files in the way the book tells you to), and when you do find the updated versions of everything, some of the commands the book gives you produce errors. Since the instructions probably worked correctly in 2004, there is no information on what those errors mean or how to fix them.
In short, I'm setting this book aside to find something more recent, and reloading the system I was using to test this with. If you do not have prior experience and a good understanding of how all of these programs work and how to troubleshoot their errors, I would recommend finding a more up-to-date book.
Not what was expected.
I am very unsatisfied with this book. It only gives instructions on how to setup a lamp using one distro only. And it was geared only to well experienced users. The book was incomprehensible to me.
Not a beginner book
This book is listed as a beginner to intermediate book, but I would rate it as intermediate at the very least. The author has a fetish for unnecessarily elaborate terminology that overcomplicates straightforward operational activities (to exemplify my point). Otherwise, it is a good overview of the four technologies and how they work together to provide a seamless web presence.
A great resource on this subject
One of the things I liked about this book was the amount of detail it had on its subjects, and yet it is not a 1000 page novel. If you just want to have a system running a web server and you don't really care about how it works and what is going on, then this is definitely not the book for you. However, if you really want to learn how these components work together and exactly what is going on, then I do recommend this book. After taking a Linux course, I picked this up and still learned quite a bit from the introduction to Linux chapter. Everything is very clearly written and easy to understand. The only thing I didn't like was that many of the pages are devoted to listing configuration files, but you can easily just skip over these if they don't apply to you.
