Hi Perrin, Thank you for the response. At least it's better to know that the book is not that bad in common sense. Let's try to talk a little (and with only minimum of emotions) about the details that just pissed me off yesterday. Every new book written about mod_perl is a very important event for the community of all people participating in development and implementation of this really good and progressive technology. This is a kind of our public face. This is a way to promote our real achievements to people who do not subscribe to this mailing list and do not read our on-line docs carefully. Every good book about mod_perl achievements can result in better contracts for each of us and can bring aboard new talented contributors. A bad book can damage/destroy public interest and finally can kill this technology. We all are in one boat over here. We should together refrain from doing mistakes (at least publicly). Personally I fail to understand: Why would I hesitate to ask list for a help being ordered to write (or review) things in which I feel not quite expert? Of course, it is not mandatory to do when you feel strong enough to take full responsibility for the result...
It's my firm belief that mod_perl-made web content compression is easy recognizable and very important achievement of our community. It saves real money and allows some real providers to serve higher content volumes without increasing hardware and traffic expenditures. It might be a brilliant promoter of mod_perl if/when being introduced appropriately... Yes, I know that content compression is not in that common use to date, and I know why. Even more - I know how to fix the situation. That was why I came up here with my Apache::Dynagzip. It is really work horse: universal, flexible, and easy configurable. To date there are no other module around with close set of properties and options... And I can not write this in my FAQ myself. Because it would be reasonably considered an impolite behavior. That was a good chance with a new book... I will be thinking about your idea concerning FAQ... Thanks, Slava ----- Original Message ----- From: "Perrin Harkins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Slava Bizyayev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 4:13 PM Subject: Re: How practical is that Practical mod_perl? > On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 03:03, Slava Bizyayev wrote: > > 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 > > Eric pre-dates you on this list by a few years. He knows his stuff. > > > 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. > > It's a 900 page book! You're talking about, what 7 pages of it? There > is going to be some errata, just like there is in every other technical > book. > > The fact is, most people do not compress their content, and those who do > probably don't have as much experience with it as you do. I certainly > wouldn't know about these details you're speaking of, and the FAQ which > you maintain doesn't fully discuss them either. It says that Dynagzip > handles them, but not that the others don't. Maybe you should add a > more complete comparison. > > > 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? > > You can't expect every page of the mod_perl site to be mentioned in the > book. > > > 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. > > It doesn't sound like the advice in the book is so terrible to me, just > not as good as it could be. More to the point, I don't see how you can > say this is all Stas' fault. Why not Eric? Why not all the technical > reviewers (like me) who didn't know enough or care enough about content > compression to suggest changes there? There's no need to be insulting > Stas. > > > 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... > > I haven't received my copy yet, but the parts of the earlier version > that I reviewed were very good. The book covers a huge amount of > ground, and is pretty much the only source of information outside of the > on-line guide that discusses many of these real-world issues. It is > based on the discussions and discoveries that have taken place on this > list over the years, and is a great source of info for anyone who > doesn't want to dig through all the old posts to get up to speed. > > - Perrin >
