Organization of This Book (Apache: The Definitive Guide)

0.4. Organization of This Book

The chapters that follow and their contents are listed here:

Chapter 1, "Getting Started": Covers web servers, how Apache works, TCP/IP, HTTP, hostnames, what a client does, what happens at the server end, choosing a Unix version, and compiling and installing Apache under both Unix and Win32.
Chapter 2, "Our First Web Site": Discusses getting Apache to run, creating Apache users, runtime flags, permissions, and site.simple.
Chapter 3, "Toward a Real Web Site": Introduces a demonstration business, Butterthlies, Inc.; some HTML; default indexing of web pages; server housekeeping; and block directives.
Chapter 4, "Common Gateway Interface (CGI) ": Demonstrates aliases, logs, HTML forms, shell script, a CGI in C, environment variables, and adapting to the client's browser.
Chapter 5, "Authentication": Explains controlling access, collecting information about clients, cookies, DBM control, digest authentication, and anonymous access.
Chapter 6, "MIME, Content and Language Negotiation": Covers content and language arbitration, type maps, and expiration of information.
Chapter 7, "Indexing": Discusses better indexes, index options, your own indexes, and imagemaps.
Chapter 8, "Redirection": Describes Alias, ScriptAlias, and the amazing Rewrite module.
Chapter 9, "Proxy Server": Covers remote proxies and proxy caching.
Chapter 10, "Server-Side Includes": Explains runtime commands in your HTML and XSSI -- a more secure server-side include.
Chapter 11, "What's Going On?": Covers server status, logging the action, and configuring the log files.
Chapter 12, "Extra Modules": Discusses authentication, blocking, counters, faster CGI, languages, server-side scripting, and URL rewriting.
Chapter 13, "Security": Discusses Apache's security precautions, validating users, binary signatures, virtual cash, certificates, firewalls, packet filtering, secure sockets layer (SSL), legal issues, patent rights, national security, and Apache-SSL directives.
Chapter 14, "The Apache API": Describes pools; per-server, per-directory, and per-request information; functions; warnings; and parsing.
Chapter 15, "Writing Apache Modules": Covers status codes; module structure; the command table; the initializer, translate name, check access, check user ID, check authorization and check type routines; prerun fixups; handlers; the logger; and a complete example.
Appendix A, "Support Organizations": Provides a list of commercial service and/or consultation providers.
Appendix B, "The echo Program ": Provides a listing of echo.c.
Appendix C, "NCSA and Apache Compatibility ": Contains Apache Group internal mail discussing NCSA/Apache compatibility issues.
Appendix D, "SSL Protocol ": Provides the SSL specification.
Appendix E, "Sample Apache Log": Contains a listing of the full log file referenced in Chapter 11, "What's Going On?".