Review of "Open Source for Windows Administrators" by Christian Gross

This is the kind of book that amateur programmers like me just love. Its filled with all sorts of tools to play with. The title implies that the books is targeted toward professional IT workers, but with web hosting as cheap as it is these days, there's a much larger audience of semi-professionals who would also benefit from this book.

Among the open source tools covered by this book (and conveniently included on the CD-ROM) are the Apache Web Server software, the PHP programming language, and the MySQL database software. I recently installed these services on my computer to support some clients, and while my installation went reasonably well (oh heck, I was overjoyed when I discovered that all three services were running OK on the first attempt because I'd heard some horror stories online!) I would have been much calmer through the whole ordeal if I'd had this book available. There is extensive coverage on installing and configuring Apache, with a special emphasis on security.

Also included are all of the mainstream browsers - Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera - as well as some nifty Unix/Linux tools, encryption and compression tools, the Python programming language, an EMail server, and much more. This book has enough cool stuff to keep a computer geek like me happy for weeks!