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.
Review quote:
"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
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
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.
Review quote:
"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
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