Stephen Spainhour : Webmaster in a Nutshell (2nd Edition)

Individuals, organizations, and businesses are relying on their web pages to provide and collect information, manage processes, and interact with communities and customers. A reliable, informative, and responsive web site can reduce cost, increase visibility, and create a positive image for the owner of that site.Behind every successful web page is an overworked and underappreciated webmaster.Webmasters make sure that the information on a site is accessible and usable; that the site is always available; that performance is good; that users can get the information that they need; and that the site can collect the information it needs to serve those users. These disparate tasks require many different tools and skills. Webmaster in a Nutshell pulls together in a single volume all the essential reference information for webmasters working on UNIX-based web servers.In this second edition of Webmaster in a Nutshell, we've updated our material to include the latest versions of HTML and Javascript, and also expanded the book to cover the newest technologies emerging on the Web. The book covers:

HTML 4.0, with special attention to forms, tables and frames
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
XML, the next-generation markup language for the Web
CGI, with a chapter dedicated to the Perl module CGI.pm
JavaScript 1.2
PHP, the HTML-embedded programming language
HTTP 1.1, the underlying protocol that drives the Web
Apache server administration, including Apache modules
mod_perl, the Apache module for enhancing CGI

Webmaster in a Nutshell, part of the bestselling O'Reilly series of reference books, makes it easy to find the information you want about the technologies you use. You'll keep your other books on the shelf; you'll keep Webmaster in a Nutshell next to your keyboard.

Amazon.com Review
Today's Webmasters must be literate in a number of different--and ever-evolving-- languages and technologies. Webmaster in a Nutshell is meant as a tool for dealing with this demanding requirement. Although this title leans a bit toward freeware tools, it offers plenty of universal information as well.

This guide briefly tours the Web and covers basic HTML, tables, forms, and frames in a series of quick reads. (This discussion offers just enough information to jog the memory to proper HTML usage.) You'll get in-depth coverage of cascading style sheets (CSS), the Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript, HTTP, CGI, and Perl. Stephen Spainhour and Robert Eckstein explore CSS in brief but do cover the pending W3C standard. They also provide a refreshingly quick overview of XML. To present JavaScript, the book makes excellent use of diagrams to illustrate the object hierarchy and the way the language works with windows and frames.

Webmaster takes on a decidedly public domain slant in its presentation of server configuration, primarily aimed at the freeware Apache server, and PHP, the freeware server-side scripting language. Even if you don't code with these tools, however, this book offers plenty of industry-standard reference. --Stephen Plain