Yesterday I've finally received a long-waiting book (http://www.modperlbook.org/) written by Stas Bekman and Eric Cholet. In fact, I don't know who is that Eric Cholet, but the presence of the name of Stas Bekman was enough in my case to decide, how important the book is supposed to be for me in order to optimize Apache configurations and perl code. I did never really plan to write any review of this book just because I feel not strong enough to discuss recommendations of the well-known leader of modern mod_perl development.
Indeed, I've got confused and disappointed when found that the book covers some area of my own expertise inappropriately. I'm talking about Chapter 11 (p.401-402) and Appendix B (p.784-787). In Chapter 11 I was surprised to learn that Stas practically uses Apache::GzipChain as a universal tool for web content compression. The direct implementation of the example configuration p.402 is supposed to lead you to about 15% of unsatisfied clients recently. BTW, it would be curious to see HTTP client logs from Apache::GzipChain over HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 for dynamically generated and partially flushed content. And how about SSL over HTTP/1.1? It would probably help even me to switch to the right handler finally one day. Then the reader has to learn that mod_gzip and mod_deflate can serve "only static outgoing files". To the best of my knowledge it's just a false, and I would bet my hardly earned buck against Stas' dime that average programmer like me would be able to configure practically mod_gzip to compress dynamic content (over HTTP/1.0). For some reason Stas forgot even to mention http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/compression/compression.html which he personally initiated about a year ago when we discussed Apache::Dynagzip over here. Is there something wrong with that text? Any questions, discussions, and/or suggestions are still very welcome. I hope the list subscribers understand that I'm writing this words with full respect and no attempt to shame Andreas Koenig for the Apache::GzipChain, or Ken Williams for Apache::Compress, or any other author of any other compression handler mentioned in the book. Every one of them was a great pioneer in proper practical implementation of mod_perl, and everyone did his best. >From my point of view, that was namely Stas who failed in this situation. He failed to recognize that the absence of information in area that you do not understand (or don't care to understand) is always better (and much more practical), than wrong and misleading recommendations. My real question to the list subscribers (see subject line) rises from the fact that I cannot review other parts of this book with full details, and since this book provides misleading recommendations about content compression opportunities on mod_perl enabled Apache I'm not sure any more about other parts... Any thoughts? Thanks, Slava
