Ask HN: How to learn more about the A in the LAMP?

by digamber_kamat on 2/25/2011, 9:45 AM with 5 comments

I recently had opportunity to participate in some LAMP workshops and company trainings.

They focused so much on PHP,mySql query writing and also a bit of Linux shell scripting but none of them went deep into Apache. They only showed how to install Apache.

The rational that the trainer generally offered was that while PHP, Linux is used by every developer, Apache will be managed by some sysadmin.

May be for those organizations it might be true. For our organization I noticed following things.

There are many teams working on LAMP projects and every team has at-least one Linux server with Apache running on it. The Apache config setup is managed by one of the developer on the team. None of these developers have put in efforts to learn more about Apache. They just use it with the default configuration.

When I dived a bit deep into performance tuning of application I realized that Apache is one component we are not looking at all.

We now want to have a dedicated training session for developers in sensitizing them more about Apache.

I request friend on HN to suggest books, topics that might be useful.

Also, please tell me if I am correct to think that Apache remains a bit of neglected child for most PHP developers around. (I am from India, and we work on outsourced projects with several thrid rate programmers)

  • by autalpha on 2/25/2011, 4:49 PM

    I am pretty sure a lot of people, myself included, learned things by actively messing with it. Books are helpful for basic, but for everything else, just installed a Linux distro (I like Debian!) and then proceed to play with it. Read a few online articles (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=141...) and just build your experience slowly. I use VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) to install Debian on my Mac/Win boxes.

    Good luck and as always there's #apache on freenode.

  • by nostrademons on 2/25/2011, 9:59 AM

    Heretical opinion: don't. Apache is a piece of shit. Use a real webserver like lighttpd or nginx, or even Tornado.

    Until you work on an actual webserver, you have little appreciation for how badly Apache manages to screw up what is conceptually a very simple operation. Then again, considering that "Apache" comes from "a patchy [webserver]", and the codebase grew organically during a time when nobody really knew what the web would be used for, it isn't that surprising.