Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl

One Minute Bottom Line

Review

My initial interest in “Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL®, memcached, and Perl” by Patrick Galbraith before I opened it was the mention of memcached.  I had heard about it, but never really knew about it.  Just another buzzword I thought . . . though I had been wrong before. I have been working with the other technologies mentioned in the title for quite some time now, so my interest in those was minimal.

Galbraith’s target audience with this book is the intermediate programmer, and he admits this is a broad group.  In the target group, there are Perl experts not interested in dealing with database issues and those that are. This book tries to bridge the gap between these two types of developers -- Galbraith does this effectively by providing a balance of technical reference material and short tutorials.

The overall flow of the book goes into explaining each component of the LAMMP stack in great detail.  Yes, the second “M” is there intentionally, and stands for Linux-Apache-MySQL®-memcached-Perl.  The book covers each component of the LAMMP stack in great detail so that anyone who reads it will gain an understanding of each individually.  It also supplies plenty of examples to demonstrate the concepts and ideas being conveyed.  Also, the book is divided into three distinct sections (there is no formal sectioning) with each ending in a chapter dedicated to developing a small application, as a cumulative demonstration of the concepts discussed in the previous chapters.  The applications are not complicated, but they more than serve the purpose of showing the basics of the subject matter.  

I found the part of the book that covers memcached to be of great interest.  As mentioned earlier, I had only heard of memcached up to this point and not known anything about it.  Reading this section made me realize that I need to rethink a couple of things on how the database section of some applications I’ve participated in is implemented.  The whole time I was thinking “Doing it like this would’ve made that application run a hell of a lot faster.”  I’m definitely bringing it up at the next development meeting I’m in.  The section probably should have been a book by itself.

Another part of the book that stood out to me is the chapter on Apache.  Galbraith gives a great overview of how Apache works.  Having installed and configured Apache many times myself, I thought it was handy to have a thorough installation procedure and configuration reference in a small space.  It was definitely much easier having an explanation of essential configuration directives in this book than it was to have to comb through Apache’s site for such information.  The convenience points are definitely high with this chapter.

I found the Appendices on installing and configuring MySQL® to be excellent, to the point that maybe they should have been chapters and not appendices.  This appendix not only explains how to install on Windows, Red Hat, and from source, but also how to install on Ubuntu.  I double-checked the MySQL® site and there are no instructions for Ubuntu specifically.  At least not for 5.0.x.

It’s hard to think of anything negative to say about this book, but for the sake of being obligated to, I will.  While the amount, detail, and clarity of the information presented is excellent and better than most I come across, the amount of data maybe a little overwhelming to some; if one were using this book to lookup a detail about a little known configuration or just to find out how something else worked, then this book might be a little much to look through.  As weak as that was, it was the only negative thing I could come up with.

Overall, I found Galbraith’s book to be extremely useful and informative.  I definitely got a great deal out of it, not only on the subject matter I did not know about, but also those that I was already knowledgeable in.  I will wear out my copy of this book very quickly because of how much I am going to find myself referencing it.