Foreword

Nick’s book is something that we’ve long been waiting for. The “Eagle Book,” which came out in 1999, was a great book, but it focused primarily on mod_perl. Thus it was a rather different thing from this book.

And this book comes along at just the right time. With web applications needing more and more scalability, we’re all looking for ways for our code to run faster, use fewer resources, have tighter integration with the webserver, and just plain be more robust.

It used to be sufficient to write Perl CGI programs to run even large websites, but over the years most of us have moved to mod_perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and other development tools that allow us to build bigger, faster, cheaper. Those of us looking for that next thing, wondering if it might be best to write our applications as an Apache module, tend to get frustrated with the lack of decent documentation and examples.

For the most part, when you ask on IRC for documentation of how to write an Apache module, the answers include looking at the code of some existing module, or looking at API documentation that was, at best, somewhat elderly and, for the most part, intended for Apache 1.3.

When Nick told me that he was going to write this book, I made sure to sign up for the first copy. I knew that Nick was the right person for the job because of his prolific module authoring and his numerous helpful tutorials.

For those of us who learn best by example and experimentation, this book is ideal—it provides many of the former and it encourages the latter. So make sure that you have your favorite editor and compiler ready as you dive in, as you’ll encounter example code almost right away and will want to try it out. And don’t be afraid to experiment.

You’ve picked the right book. This is sure to become the de facto standard document about how to write an Apache module.

—Rich Bowen
September 2006