Database Backed Web Sites: The Thinking Person's Guide to Web Publishing

Some of the specific technology described in this book is a little outdated now, but the core techniques live on. Greenspun's writing is a delight to read, and the information he shares here will provide you with the foundational knowledge on which to build a wide variety of web applications. Buy this book (or read the online version at philip.greenspun.com), follow the examples, and start building yourself (and others) great, content-filled, easy-to-use web sites.

Philip Greenspun is a rare find: a techie who knows how to communicate. He doesn't even limit himself to one media! While other books may take a schlolarly approach to building websites, Greenspun's story is told by someone who's rolled up his sleeves. As the reader, you get to view web-database design through Greenspun's eye for detail. All tech books should be this good.

This book focuses on the goals of Web site design rather than the nuts and bolts. Although the book contains specific code fragments, it is not a coding book. Rather it is a chronicle of Greenspun's experiences in setting up more than 50 Web sites over the years. This chronicle contains many hard-won lessons that will help prevent the reader from making similar mistakes. Greenspun has an easy-to-read writing style and a wry sense of humor. (The book has no CD ROM attached to the inside back cover but a picture of a CD ROM with the international "No" symbol overprinted. All code an more is available from Greenspun's Web sites, as you would expect from a book about Web sites.) He also emphasizes esthetic choices and subscribes to a minimalist visual style, in the book and for Web sites, that enhance reading and make downloads as fast as possible.

Very unique book. Presents viewpoints that one has to look very hard to find nowadays: accurate, not sugar-coated, and honest. The most useful *concept* in the book is that sticking to standards is good; a site that looks great but is all line breaks and font tags is a (mostly) useless site. The most useful *tool* (for me) was actually learning how a relational database works; they're a lot simpler than one would think. I've often heard of them but not even bothered to find out more because they seemed overkill for the task. Also, AOLserver is the last thing I would have used, it being owned by the same people who brought us America Online, but it's really the best tool I've seen for the job if you really want to put up an online database; only problem I have with it is that I've not taken the time to learn some of the more advanced configuration syntax, which isn't the server's fault. Which brings me to the third most useful toolset, Lisp and MetaHTML. (Including them together because MH is largely inspired by the former). Lisp is another thing I'd heard about but thought was the wrong tool or overkill. It's really one of the easiest languages I've seen to learn, and certainly the most elegant.

It would be inefficient to repeat all the glowing compliments about this book made by previous reviewers. My favorite aspect of this must-read book are the true-to-life examples that bring the esoterica of this topic to a level the rest of us can understand and enjoy. As an example of such an example, I've quoted this from Chapter 11, on why backups are vital: "At noon, an ugly mob of users assembles outside your office, angered by your introduction of frames and failure to include WIDTH and HEIGHT tags on IMGs. You send one of your graphic designers out to explain how 'cool' it looked when run off a local disk in a demo to the Vice-President. The mob stones him to death and then burns your server farm to the ground." Need I say more?