Blurbs for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

Blurbs from People Who Actually Read the Whole Book

"This is required reading in my seminar on information design: a wise book on Web design and technical matters by an author with a good eye in addition to good programming skills."

"Your book is the best one I've read about web publishing, bar none."

Blurbs from People on Whose Server I have Root Password

Philip Greenspun interfaced our 60 GB Oracle medical record database to the Web in 1994. It took him three weeks and all it cost me was a 4 GB hard disk and some SIMMs for his Macintosh. Since then, Greenspun has become too rich and famous to write Perl anymore. I'm going to use this book to train some high school kids to replace him.

"Caught up in the frenzy of just being there, we have all been enticed by the possibilities the Net offers in a one-to-one world of idea and transactional commerce. Many have planted expensive seeds on the Net with the hope that they will germinate into something of value. Greenspun has thoroughly captured the logic of what can win from the viewpoint of both the creator, who may be, and the viewer, who is, king. Information and ideas can serve lofty purposes but without organization, tools to easily mine and find, and an audience to share and view, there is no purpose."

Blurbs from People Whose Products I Plug

"This is the first book on RDBMS-backed Web sites that an intelligent programmer can enjoy"

Blurbs from People Who Work In My Building at MIT

If you want to be a part of where the Web is going, you need to read this book. The Web is not just about looking at pages of text, it is about interacting with live information, sorted and organized the way you want. To do this, your Web server has to be a database server. But that is only the first insight. A database server is not just about downloading product information from online retail catalogs, it is about update too--a framework where a community of like-minded people can build a structured repository of shared information. That is the second insight. The third insight? It does not take millions of dollars to do this. It can be done cheaply enough that "anyone" can operate a Web server with a database. Read the book and learn how.

"There are a lot of books that will tell you how to design a web site that looks like something else --- a computer game, or a print magazine --- which would be great if web pages were computer games or print magazines. They aren't. Read this book to find out what they are."

"Greenspun's prize-winning and colorful Web publishing experience is as old as the Web and a must for all aspiring Web publishers."

Blurbs from Serious Bigshots Who Are Friends with My Friends

"IBM has been working for 20 years to build high performance relational database management systems. This book gives you field-tested ideas and techniques to unlock the data and deliver it to users across the Internet."

"Smart companies are using the Web to support collaboration. Smarter companies will be using the Web to support computer-to-computer transactions. Philip Greenspun has written the first book that explains how to do both elegantly."