Review: Web Site Cookbook

Web Site CookbookWeb Site Cookbook : Solutions & Examples for Building and Administering Your Web Site (O’Reilly, 2006) by Doug Addison is the first of the O’Reilly cookbooks I’ve really looked at closely. It’s a reference book rather than an instruction manual. It’s the kind of book where you look in the index first to find the page you need and read just the bit from the page that answers your question.

The thing that I find valuable about this book from a teaching point of view is that it answers all those questions that students ask (and need to know) that aren’t in the book you’re probably using as your chief text. What kinds of questions am I talking about? Almost everything related to making web sites is in here: finding hosting, buying domains, creating graphics, designing logos, adding information to mailto links, using cookies, creating favicons, using htaccess and mod_rewrite, self-signed SSL certificates, custom error pages, maintaining a MySQL database and more.

Teaching aside, this reference would be useful to anyone who was still not completely sure about everything involved with building and maintaining a web site. It’s a good reference book to have on your shelf.

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