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Nginx HTTP Server

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Nginx HTTP Server

327 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2010

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5 stars
8 (8%)
4 stars
43 (46%)
3 stars
28 (30%)
2 stars
12 (12%)
1 star
2 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
Profile Image for Jascha.
151 reviews
April 8, 2015
Despite its usage is getting wider, the literature dedicated to Nginx is still very limited, making the choice of a title both easy and difficult at the same time. If this wasn’t enough, the official documentation leaves many of us with a bitter sweet taste in the mouth: it’s not as complete as it should be and certainly not that user-friendly. Among those few choices that we, readers, have, this brand new second edition of Nginx HTTP Server, an introductory text to get people started with Nginx, with an emphasis on those coming from years of Apache.

As aforementioned, this title is for beginners, people that have never played with Nginx. Anyone interested in some real world, decently serious problem-solution won’t find anything worth reading here. Forget to find inhere a step by step guide to get you compiling Nginx from the source with Passenger to serve both Ruby on Rails and Django.

It’s a book for beginners. As such, it starts with an “Hello world!”-like chapter that guides you through the installation process, which is very likely to get done through Aptitude.

Three chapters are then dedicated to the basic configuration of Nginx. This is by far the best part of the whole book. What I find particularly interesting here, is the choice of the author to present different configurations to serve different load scenarios. Mind, nothing fancy or critical, but it gives you an idea of the overall configuration of the web server.

A quick introduction to how CGI evolved gets us to chapter five, where Nginx meets FastCGI. The chapter is merely theoretical. Code snippets are as rare as unicorn sightings, but still, Clement gives an idea how to combine it with PHP and Python.

Finally the author gets to the relationship between Apache and Nginx, covering different flavors: the story starts with how they can be combined, coexisting and gets up to the point where Nginx can replace Apache.

The book itself is not bad. But it feels more like a reference, rather than a companion to the official documentation. The different options are described one by one, page after page, which is something the official website should do. I would also like to see more images, showing me the overall picture and how the different components fit into place. Those few images present could have had better quality.

So, given the very few choices out there, this book is recommended but only to newbies. Whoever is able to get Nginx up and running from the source will only get bored with this title.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!
Profile Image for Oskar Hane.
1 review
November 3, 2013
This is a good book that covers the basics from installing, configuring and running a nginx server. It's well written and uses a simple language so everybody can understand.

Chapter 1 takes you through downloading and installing nginx on your server. I always use Debian so I didn't really pay much attention to this chapter.

Chapter 2 is about basic config and talks about what modules are.

Chapter 3 goes through all http configuration directives with short descriptions making it easy to read as well. This is a good chapter. You can of course read about all this online, but the book is good at explaining the most common directives.

Chapter 4 is about module configurations and writes a lot about the rewrite module and explains some basic regex patterns and rules as well. Good intro to someone!

Chapters 5 explains what FastCGI is and how you can make nginx communicate with PHP-FPM and Python via sockets and TCP. This is the best chapter in the book and shows how you can scale up your app by adding dedicated PHP servers behind the nginx server.

Chapter 6 covers how you can run Apache and nginx next to each other where would be nginx taking over all static file delivery and Apache still handling the dynamic parts and chapter 7 is about how you migrate your web app from Apache to nginx with lots of good rewrite examples.

Overall, a very good book on nginx for the beginner! Even I, a rather advanced nginx user learned a few tricks. :)

Nginx HTTP Server Second Edition
Profile Image for Laurens.
7 reviews
July 20, 2012
A great reference to nginx. A big step up from the inconsistent documentation that the nginx wiki offers.
Profile Image for Pranay Kothapalli.
14 reviews1 follower
October 22, 2017
Great book. Author has a great grasp on the topic, although it's overwhelming for me to understand everything in the book. I learned a lot about backend servers. The Django <=> Nginix is outdated on previous versions, so pick up the latest edition if you're looking to harness Django's capabilities with nginix. 4 stars because it lacks a lot of examples.
November 29, 2022
It's a great book for introducing your self with Nginx. If you are using kubernetes it's will help also because ingress use nginx. I strongly recommend it for everyone who has services which are using nginx.
June 26, 2013
Nginx HTTP Server was such an amazing read I can't stop singing it's praises. This book is a must read for any and all perspective users of Linux based web servers not just Nginx.

The introduction of this book gives you a bit of background on Linux server administration although it does not go into details. After reading this you will know enough to run a Linux server with no problems. It moves on giving you as much detail as possible for the installation process and getting it set up for basic use.

The book covers everything you need to know about the http and other modules you might want to use from SSI to ssl and others.

The later chapters cover all the information you might need when setting up a web server to use Fast-CGI with PHP or python. It even covers a small section of setting up Nginx to work with Django.

The final chapters cover the use of Apache and Nginx together if you are used to a current Apache architecture and you feel you are more comfortable with it.

Even the appendices have great information in them, giving you a nice and complete summery of all the directives and modules for reference and even a troubleshooting section.

In all I can recommend this book to anyone that is planning on managing a web server and I would say this is a must read for anyone that is looking into managing a high traffic site or are looking to upgrade a current high traffic site.
March 19, 2014
I have been using Nginx for some years now and I recently decided to buy this book just to go through the basics once more.

I have to say this book is very good written with great examples and good explained although I wished that some chapters where slightly larger with more example I still think this book with the official Nginx wiki together provides a great amount of knowledge.

I recommend this book for anyone just to get the basic and to learn how to setup things correctly.

Great product!
Profile Image for David Robillard.
136 reviews8 followers
September 25, 2014
Intersting read for Apache admins who think about changing to Nginx. But there's way too much info that is simply found in the man page. More real world scenarios would have been better IMHO. In the end, we're still changing to Nginx. Not because of this book, but rather because our load testing results show Nginx as faster for the same amount of CPU and memory resources. And it's easier to configure. Well, that's a question of taste of course. But after 15 years of httpd.conf files, I prefer nginx.conf syntax. YMMV of course.
Profile Image for Terry.
105 reviews4 followers
June 17, 2012
A decent book. Could have done with more scenario-based explanations of implementations. The graphic explanations were good where instantiated, but could have been more visual in explaining new-to-grasp things like location block precedence. Could have been better, but my ranking may change based upon how well I flip back to this.
Profile Image for Johan.
1,215 reviews2 followers
August 27, 2011
Thanks to this book the information available on Nginx started to make sense. Still have a lot of studying ahead, but if I go through with my plan to have my virtual private server (a LEMP) it will be thanks to this book.
Profile Image for John Hobbs.
125 reviews3 followers
June 12, 2012
Excellent reference. There is a nice big chunk about when and how to migrate from Apache, which is great.

If you want to grok nginx quickly, I would recommend this book.
Profile Image for 박은정 Park.
Author 5 books42 followers
December 16, 2012
Early chapters: Surprisingly, fit for linux newbies.
Later chapters: Fit for people who are used to Apache servers, and would like to find out what Nginx servers' pros and cons are.
Profile Image for Sergii Manannikov.
8 reviews5 followers
March 19, 2015
Great books, that briefly explains basic principles of how web server works, and as well describes most of modules that it supports. Much better than official documentation, as for me.
63 reviews54 followers
April 7, 2017
The book does a good job of explaining concepts. However it is awkward/annoying having documentation-like content interspersed throughout tutorial content.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews

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