From the book lists at Adware Report:

All information current as of 01:00:56 Pacific Time, Friday, 7 January 2005. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing    by Philip Greenspun   Paperback:     Morgan Kaufmann     April, 1999    US$32.61       Usually ships in 24 hours     Qualifies for free shipping    (when your total order of eligible items meets the US$25 minimum.)    Check the details for more information. Click the button below to . . .      (which will add the book to your Amazon U.S.A. "Shopping Cart") . . . or use your browser's Back button to return to the search-list page.

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Editorial description(s):

Amazon.com
This isn't another cookie-recipe approach to planning a successful Web site. Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, by MIT veteran Philip Greenspun, is both broadly conceptual and deeply technical, and it assumes that the reader is willing to think seriously about the challenge of building a content site, a community site, or an e-commerce store before plunging in.

Although heavily Unix-oriented, it does not set out to proselytize a product, or even suggest that there is only one way to solve certain technical challenges. Rather, it encourages the reader to think about Web content and functionality as something designed to help visitors answer questions or do something useful. This may sound nebulous, but his observations about why Web sites go bad are illustrated with many well-chosen examples.

The core of the book is quite technical. Three long sections on publishing, community, and e-commerce architectures are illustrated by the author's data models and working open-source systems, so someone with C, SQL, and a good understanding of Internet Protocol (IP) under his or her belt will get the most out of the discussion. Such technical readers will find numerous Web addresses and other citations for further technical information. The author also invites readers to use his code if appropriate.

Although there is a lot of technical meat here, Greenspun dispenses with a dry, technical tone. Throughout, he manages to speak to the reader in a way that is always interesting and frequently bemused or ironic. The overall effect is that of a wry professor who knows his stuff, has thought about the problems, and isn't about to engage in commercial puffery. --Kathleen Caster


From Library Journal
A technical manual that is also a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, this is the oddest, most interesting guide on web design and publishing this reviewer has ever read. "This book is a catalog of the mistakes that I've made while building more than 100 Web sites in the last five years," writes webmaster Greenspun, who teaches at MIT. Covering web publishing and web-based services in a lively, engaging tone, he makes complex technical ideas simple and accessible to beginners and nontechies who have to manage large web sites. Drop-dead photos taken by Greenspun and available for free on his site (www.photo.net) illustrate the text. Greenspun also gives away almost all the software he writes about and uses, and the entire book is available on the web (http://www. photo.net/wtr/thebook/). Still, all libraries should seriously consider getting one or two copies of the wonderful print version.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
"If you want to be a part of where the Web is going, you need to read this book..."
Dave Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet, 1981-1989

"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."
Edward Tufte, WIRED Magazine, June 1998

"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."
J. Paul Holbrook, Director, Internet Technologies, CNN


J. Paul Holbrook, Director, Internet Technologies, CNN
"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."


Edward Tufte, WIRED Magazine, June 1998
"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."


Review
"If you want to be a part of where the Web is going, you need to read this book..."
Â--Dave Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet, 1981-1989

"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."
Â--Edward Tufte, WIRED Magazine, June 1998

"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."
Â--J. Paul Holbrook, Director, Internet Technologies, CNN


Book Info
Presents the advice of the author's extensive experience as a Webmaster to help you avoid needless wasting of time and money on aesthetics, and focus on the development of truely useful websites. Softcover. DLC: Web sites--Design.


From the Back Cover
"If you want to be a part of where the Web is going, you need to read this book..."
Dave Clark, Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet, 1981-1989

"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."
Edward Tufte, WIRED Magazine, June 1998

"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."

J. Paul Holbrook, Director, Internet Technologies, CNN

From the author's 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.

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.

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

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.

For the users of the world, I document a comprehensive open-source approach to building online communities and show a collaborative Web-based way that we can dig ourselves out of our desktop application morass.


About the Author
Philip Greenspun founded the Scalable Systems for Online Communities group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of five books, mostly on horrifyingly dull technical subjects. Greenspun was born in 1963 and raised in Bethesda, Maryland. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Alex, his Samoyed.


Book Description
From the author's 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.

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.

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

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.

For the users of the world, I document a comprehensive open-source approach to building online communities and show a collaborative Web-based way that we can dig ourselves out of our desktop application morass.

*Includes 200 photographs from Greenspun's highly successful photo.net Web site.
*Presents a general theory of the issues in Web Publishing.




Reader review(s):

Bad design, amateur photos, bloated book, June 29, 2000
Usability is a valued function in print, not just on the web. Phil and Alex's way cool in-joke laden guide could be edited down by 30% without any loss in content, printed on non-gloss paper to save 30-=50% more in unneeded weight. 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. Do not attempt to use this book if you suffer from any form of RSI... it's as though the author has intentionally created a 25 pound laptop and every programmer in the world is forced to fall over in adulation. Aparently, Mr. Greenspun did not have the opportunity to go through the 2-3 year stage of amateur dabbling in desktop graphics most of us went through with Photoshop 2.0 . What is ludicrous is that even our most eminent thinker about "information design" dares not to mention that this book is an insult to the art and craft of information design in print. Excess weight causes severe spine breakage, the absurdly wasteful use of high gloss paper means that the pages resist being underlined or marked for those who want to create notation, and the photos are as distracting and counterproductive as 100 one megabyte jpegs of baboons would be pushed into every page of my online edition of the New York Times. The varnished paper is, of course, non-recyclable. Philip, the design of your book violates every single rule you hammer away at for 570 pages. Keep the dog, hire an editor, drop the ego, practice in print what you preach on the web. Read Ed Tufte's books and make the next edition actually use graphic presentation to communicate. Respect print, it's older than you are.

Simply Superb, April 14, 2000
I received this book as a birthday gift about six months ago and I read it from cover-to-cover within 2 days. Even though the book is 600 pages long, I enjoyed each and every word. Philip Greenspun's wry comments, ironic satire and intelligent prose make for an enjoyable, technical read.

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.

This book is invaluable for anyone who is considering construction of a true web service -- in today's world, the power and versatility that a database lends is necessary for a web site's sucess.

Overall, this book is superb and covers the subject definitively.

This is not a book on designing user interfaces to database-backed websites. It focuses on constructing a versatile, reliable and expandable backend that can run your site for many years.

As for web interface design, I like Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen. I find myself using these two books in combination to create a nice 1-2 punch :)

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, November 27, 1999
This is the best stand alone book on web publishing that I have found. It serves as both a reference and a pretty good cover to cover read, which is rare. The loosely related photographs throughout and the high quality paper make it a good buy. It covers all the bases of putting up a web site including the hardware, programming, hosting, design, etc. (plus an outstanding primer on e-commerce) It provides great references for all its topics on both the web and in print. It has some small but useful tutorials on SQL and HTML which can help you at least get started. The thinly veiled contempt that Mr. Greenspun has for Microsoft and even Macintosh is somewhat off-putting for those of us not quite ready or able to embrace Unix; but he does try to point out the benefits of all major platforms, web servers and databases.He doesn't talk much of the future of web design because I don't think he believes that what defines a quality site will change much when we all have cable modems; he often mentions how most current "advances" in programming and operating systems were actually born in the 60's and 70's. Overall, the book gives a strong sense of being up-to-date,unlike most books about the web which seem dated by the time they are printed. I have yet to see a more useful resource for allowing would-be web publishers to see what they are up against.

Horrible. Don't fall for the egotistical propaganda., June 26, 2001
On the surface this looks like a cool book. It's an easy read. It has lots of colorful pictures. Most of the stuff that Adolph...I mean Philip says makes sense. Then you realize what this book is really about...Philip making money. Everything that he writes points you back to having to use his ACS system. He is SO anti-boxed-software that it's not even funny. Everything that he says that his ACS can do, other back-end systems can do too. Thousands of sites around the world do it withOUT using the ACS. He wants you to believe that the ONLY way to get a solid database driven web site is to use the ACS. That is just not true. Companies get sucked in by all of the neat features of his system that they don't stop to think about the future.... The only people on earth who can manage that system are people who work for HIS company. There are maybe 4 or 5 people outside that company who know how to use it. So, if you start using their system and realize that they are charging you too much money (which they will) you are S.O.L. because there is no one on earth that you can hire to be your developer/programmer. If you had used a back-end that the rest of the world knows and understands there would be no problem. This book is just a tool to suck you in to his company and then trap you into using his software. Avoid this book and avoid the company. There are dozens of better books out there explaining this topic withOUT as much ego. The fact that the guy wasted space in the book and made you pay for extra pages and high-quality color printing so you can see his photos should tell you something. If I wanted a photography book I would have bought one. This man thinks he's God and should be avoided at all costs.

This book looks horrible ?, December 10, 1999
... because it is the first coffee table book that I've ever bought and then proceeded to mark up - underling passages, writing notes, questions etc.

It is a totally unique book on many different levels. A computer book with photographs? I am attracted to bizarre juxtapositions, loved the concept but was confident that the execution would be lacking. I was wrong.

I didn't understand everything (this book has a good deal of code (which I skimmed over)) but at the same time is both quite accessible and an incredible resource for non-programmers. An extraordinary accomplishment.

Greenspun makes a compelling case for what he believes a web site should be and at the same time manages to offer lots of specific, practical advice. His core advice - what to do and the technologies to use - has to be on target. It's what smart people pay lots of money to smart consultants for. Unlike any other book I've read, I got the feeling that I had hired a really smart consultant who was telling me exactly what to do and what not to do.

If all of this were not enough, the book highlights several free services his site offers to other web site owners interested in providing different kinds of collaboration and interactivity. The services run on his monster machine. Cost, zero.

In closing, I'd like to give some examples of his sense of humor.

"CORBA circa 1998 is a lot like an Arizona housing development circa 1950. The architect's model looks great. The model home is comfortable. You'll have water and sewage hookups real soon now".

"Johnny drives to the bookstore and spends $30 on an 'I stole the program and now I need a book on how to use it' book".

"Desktop apps promised to deliver the power of computers to the ordinary citizen; in fact, they delivered the pain of a corporate administration job right into the ordinary citizen's home or office".

One other thing - if you're really technically inclined - he basically gives you a blueprint for making a truckload of money. With that, I'll conclude with one more quote. Just bear in mind that this is from a guy who gives away CPU cycles, gives free seminars, and will let you download this book from his web site.

"Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris".

Exceptionally Helpful Distilled Web Wisdom, Plus More, January 16, 2000
Was the book valuable for me/do I think I got my money's worth?

Absolutely. I was trying to get current perspective on hardware and software options, scope-of-resources required, etc., for construction and operation of a database-backed website. It took only a small fraction of the text to answer my questions; I view the remaining 550+ pages as exceptional bonus material, and consider myself fortunate for having obtained the book.

Who else might find this book useful?

Regardless of whether one's role is as a strategy planner, programmer, database administrator, etc., it seems that anyone learning and applying the "teachings" put forward in Greenspun's book should have greatly improved chances that his or her publishing, transactional commerce or other database-backed Web site/service will be 1) more valuable for anyone who uses it, and 2) less frustrating and costly to develop and implement. (And by avoiding some of the software and approaches the author "does not recommend," this book may help save some readers' Web businesses from potentially fatal fiascos.)

Is this a standard "how to" guide? What's the style/approach?

It is not a perfunctory "this is how it's done" guide. Rather, it's a series of engaging, fun and easy-to-read discussions of issues that one will likely encounter while attempting to develop and operate any of a range of websites, e.g., static, collaborative, ecommerce, publishing, not-for-profit, experimental, etc. sites. The author poses lots of questions, highlights many potential pitfalls "lurking out there," provides alternative solutions to these problems, and gives pretty convincing arguments about which are the best solutions among the alternatives. Examples are given to try to teach how to think and organize your efforts to afford maximum useful results. The book is based on the extensive experiences of the author and his collaborators while they were working on the abovementioned types of sites.

There are suggestions about how to build a better mousetrap: to put yourself into the Web site users' shoes, to anticipate users' questions, and to take advantage of the collaborative power of the Web. There's help identifying some of the nastiest potential pitfalls for Web-based systems, and what to do about them, e.g., what kind of lock management RDBMS architecture will work for Web sites (and what won't work); what to do about bouncing email, site backup, and software version control; and how to avoid the "design recapitulates bureaucracy" model of Web design. There's perspective on how to think about allocating resources: "...[certain inefficiencies are] insignificant compared to the value of the company they [a well known Web company] built by focusing on the application and not fighting bugs in some award-winning Web connectivity tool programmed by idiots and tested by no one." And there's coaching about the importance of site interaction design, data modeling, site speed, reliability, maintainability, and "modifiability."

What other valuable material is presented?

-Case histories of concepts and sites that work, their "process concept diagrams" and sample source code. -Specific recommendations for software products, hardware products, and ISP providers. -A nice simple introduction to RDBMSs and SQL. -Discussion of additional topics including: security, user personalization, privacy, and publicizing a site. -Numerous critically screened references for Web sites and printed publications, for further study.

Also woven into the book in an amusing style is some history of the evolution of software engineering and the Web, and about 270 of the author's photographs (of nice quality, but not necessarily directly related to the text) which make the book easy on the eyes.

Other favorite one-liners from the book?

"...in the end, it is much easier to hype twenty-first century [software] features than to actually sit down and implement features from two decades ago," and "Afraid or not, you will eventually have to think...."

Final comments?

The author's simultaneous excellent handle on an immense array of fine details AND understanding of the big picture is quite impressive (in fact, the author is part of the big picture). The book also leaves me with "lots of food for further thought."

Very insightful but not a "how to" book, September 6, 2001
What our follow reader Matt Dougherty said in his review is basically very accurate, with the exception that I am leaning more towards seeing Mr. Greenspun's bloated ego (as stated himself) as his motive for writing the book rather than a profit motive. We should respect the author's boldness in airing his personal and very subjective view of what is right and wrong for the computer industry. Afterall, many great minds throughout history were very opinionated and eccentric. Whether the readers can use those points of view to their benefit is another story. If you are looking for a book that talks about the technical know-hows on how to build a web site (such as books published by O'Reilly or the ...for Dummies series), this is NOT the book you are looking for. It will provide much philosophical guidance on what a good web site, server, and program should be like based on the author's baised views. Although very insightful in many respect, his suggestions could be too narrow for most reader's needs. The writing is also about subjects that require very mixed levels of expertise on the reader's part. Some part of it is for novices and will drive a guru to sleep, while some will require very specialized technical background to understand.
It will be interesting to know if someone could spend the time to check how many times the word "MIT" appears in this book. When the author mentioned that the world believes Microsoft products are excellent because of the many impressions advertisement made, I went to sleep believing that MIT is THE only university that is worth attending. The author denounced the book "Creating Killer Web Sites" and many graphic artists by saying that too much unnecessary graphic on the web is meaningless to the users while his book is full of meaningless photos (that he took) and using excessively heavy paper normally reserved for printing books on arts. My point is that he is not doing what he preaches, which makes him no better than the "losers" (the Microsoft programmers) he refers to.
In summary, you will gain a few excellent insights about building web sites. You will find a lot of wasted time reading about the author's self-promotion including but not limited to the numerous mediocre photos he took. Good reading if you do it on the Internet through his web site, but a waste of $40 if you are buying the book.

Very readable, down-to-earth book on Web Publishing, November 19, 2001
Greenspun writes in a very direct, down-to-earth and, at times, self-critical manner. Graphics designers, MBA's, bloated corporate management and packaged Web solutions receive ruthless trashing (but: with good arguments to support the trashing). This book contains both technical information (albeit heavily biased towards AOLServer, TCL and Oracle) and clear explanations of the ideas and design choices.

Note, this is not a book that will teach you fancy HTML tags, really cool SQL queries or powerplay server-side scripting. You should read it for its ideas and then seek additional documentation for implementation specifics.

The book is printed on heavy, glossy paper and is stuffed with Greenspun's photographs (which may be appreciated much more at www.photo.net, a website he started several years ago). The quality of the book's binding is, sadly, quite insufficient. Even with proper care, several pages have fallen out within a few months.

In short: I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about (starting in) Web design and, most importantly, online communities.

The best book I bought last year, February 13, 2000
_Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing_ is everything that most computer books are not: it is well-written, well-organized, thought through thoroughly, funny, opinionated, beautifully laid out, beautifully illustrated, and, best of all, it will not be obsolete in three years. Anyone who is interested in database-backed Web sites (especially people who are not experienced with RDBMS) owes it to himself to take a look at this book. I've read it cover-to-cover twice: the first time to get a sense of the subject (and to be entertained), the second time to learn how to get started. Even though I'm using MySQL/PHP&Cold Fusion/Apache rather than the Oracle/AOLServer combination that Greenspun recommends and focuses on, about 90% of his book is still relevant to what I am doing. This is the best book I have bought in a long time, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Amusing, but sadly dated, November 28, 2001
Greenspun writes well. He gives a good, clear explanation of web development and e-commerce. And the jokes are often funny.

But - the world about which he writes no longer exists, and possibly never existed. This book is about as dated and as irrelevant now as those "how to survive the Y2K catastrophe" things that were all over the bookstores before December 31, 1999 and in the trash on January 1, 2000.

I suppose, like other dotcom executives, he's writing his "what went wrong" memoirs now.

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