Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

Author : Philip Greenspun
ISBN : 1558605347
Paper : 608
Publisher : Morgan Kaufmann
Publication Date : April 1999, revised June 2003

From the Preface:

This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I've made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years. I wrote it in the hopes that others won't have to repeat those mistakes.

In a society that increasingly rewards specialists and narrowness, Web publishing is one of the few fields left where the generalist is valuable. To make a great site, you need to know a little bit about writing, photography, publishing, Unix system administration, relational database management systems (RDBMS), user interface design, and computer programming. I have thus assumed no specific technical background among my readers and have tried to make the text self-contained.

Intended Audience:

For the manager in charge of a Web publication or service, this book gives you the big picture. It is designed to help you to affirmatively make the high-level decisions that determine whether a site will be manageable or unmanageable, profitable or unprofitable, popular or unpopular, reliable or unreliable. I don't expect you to be down in the trenches typing Oracle SQL queries. But you'll learn enough from this book to decide whether in fact you need a database, whom to hire as the high database priest, and whom to allow anywhere near the database. You'll be able to have a conversation with a database expert. If you get bogged down in some of the tech chapters, I encourage you to skip to the end where I present a vision of the future informed by my 22 years at the same email address.

For the literate computer scientist, I hope to expose the beautiful possibilities in Web service design. I want to inspire you to believe, as I do, that this is the most interesting and exciting area in which we can work.

For the instructors who've been using my book as a course text, I've added "More" sections at the bottom of each chapter pointing to in-depth reference material.

For the student, I've thrown in lots of my photos so that when the class is over, you'll have a nice coffee table book.

For the working Web designer or programmer, I want to arm you with a new vocabulary and mental framework for building sites. There can be more to life than making a client's bad ideas flesh with PhotoShop and Perl/CGI.

Reviews:

Amazon.com

"This book is the best that I have come across for designing database-backed websites. Unlike the numerous other books on the topic, this one doesn't dispense with advertising or commerical gimmicks. Dr. Greenspun is strikingly honest and speaks from personal experience -- he has designed and created over 200 database backed websites in his professional career."

"Greenspun abuses print the way the web novices he critiques use the web--utterly superfluous production values that add no value to the user but only heap on costs and hence price; utterly gratuitous graphics which prove that force me, the book buyer, to subsidize Greenspun's embarrassingly mediocre talent as a photographer, and utter inability to generate creative or useful graphic illustrations to help communicate the rich and bountiful insights that pour forth from his fertile mind."

"... this book is the perfect reference for teaching a class on website development, in a manner that gives students a broad perspective before they delve into the inevitable geek stuff: web application programming, data models, and SQL queries."

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