Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (Paperback)

The author teaches his now-famous one-day Web application design course. Registration includes a copy of the book. Catch it on June 16 in Los Angeles and on June 25 in Cambridge (coinciding with winners of the ArsDigita Prize). Visit register.photo.net to sign up.

"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.

Authors:

Philip Greenspun runs the Scalable Systems for Online Communities group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the founder of ArsDigita, a Web development and hosting firm that distributes open-source toolkits for building community and e-commerce Web sites. Like most dogs these days, Alex Greenspun has a personal Web site, but he also has his own email address and links to other Samoyeds with their own email addresses. Alex and Philip live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Pi goddess Eve Andersson, who takes care of them both.

Table of Contents:

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1: Envisioning a Site That Won't Be Featured in Suck.com
Chapter 2: So You Want to Join the World's Grubbiest Club: Internet Entrepreneurs
Chapter 3: Scalable Systems for Online Communities
Chapter 4: Static Site Development
Chapter 5: Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes
Chapter 6: Adding Images to Your Site
Chapter 7: Publicizing Your Site (Without Irritating Everyone on the Net)
Chapter 8: So You Want to Run Your Own Server
Chapter 9: User Tracking
Chapter 10: Sites That Are Really Programs
Chapter 11: Sites That Are Really Databases
Chapter 12: Database Management Systems
Chapter 13: Interfacing a Relational Database to the Web
Chapter 14: Ecommerce
Chapter 15: Case Studies
Chapter 16: Better Living Through Chemistry
Chapter 17: A Future So Bright You'll Need to Wear Sunglasses
Glossary

Web-Enhanced:

Links to source code, excerpts, and other goodies are available at http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/.

Related Titles:

Computer & Communication Networks
Information Technology