Ivan Ristić

Apache Security Wordle

Apache Security 1ed now available from Feisty Duck

Apache Security was originally published by O'Reilly in 2005, and it was very well received. Soon after publication, it was heralded as the best Apache security resource, according to many. Contrary to my expectations, it also aged very gracefully, which is probably why it continues to be popular. As much as I wanted to release an update, I struggled for years to justify a second edition. When I finally could, it turned out that O'Reilly was not too keen on the idea.

[Note: This blog post contains the entire preface to the digital reprint edition of Apache Security. More information on the book is available from the Feisty Duck's web site.]

That was an opportunity for me to do things differently. As much as I enjoyed working on Apache Security a few years ago, the process was traditional and slow. It was a new digital age and we had all the advanced technology at our fingertips, yet we were still producing books the old-fashioned way. I wanted more. Above all, I wanted the ability to update my books whenever I felt the need. Unable to find a publisher that supported the process I wanted, I started my own publishing company. Feisty Duck, as my wife and I named it, is a publisher of computer books, with special focus on continuous publishing and digital delivery.

We are now releasing what is pretty much the original Apache Security, in digital format only, in order to establish a starting point for the second edition, which will be published by Feisty Duck at some point in the future. The known errors in the book have been fixed. If further errors are discovered, they will be fixed, too, and the digital version will be updated.

You may wonder whether the first edition of Apache Security is still worth paying for. After all, it has been five years since the first edition. Here's what I think:

• The only part of the book that is completely obsolete is the ModSecurity chapter. I have only myself to blame for that, because I completely rewrote ModSecurity itself in 2006. If ModSecurity is what you're after, you should look at my other book, ModSecurity Handbook (Feisty Duck, 2010). You will find more information about it at https://www.feistyduck.com.
• Chapter 10, "Web Application Security," was the best introduction to the topic at the time of the original publication. It remains a good introduction, but there have been many advances and discoveries since it was written. These days, you actually have to read several books to get decent coverage of web application security, and complete coverage is virtually impossible.
• The same can be said for Chapter 11, "Web Security Assessment": it's still good, but it's just not enough any more.
• The rest of the book remains pretty solid. Five years later, some aspects are not entirely accurate, but what is in the book is still very useful. You will find that the general principles of web server security haven't changed at all.

To conclude, Apache Security is still a good book, although it will no longer serve all audiences equally well. To paraphrase a recent Amazon.com reviewer, if you are at the beginner or intermediate levels, it will work for you. If you are an advanced user, it may not. If you are not sure, the best thing to do is decide by looking at the table of contents.

ModSecurity Handbook available for pre-order and early access

ModSecurity Handbook, which I announced a couple of days ago, is now available for pre-order and early digital access. We managed to meet our self-imposed deadline and have everything ready for November 24th, actually.

This book is a big deal, in more ways than one:

1. It took me more than 5 years to gather courage to start writing another book (after Apache Security, which I started writing in 2004).
2. This book is about ModSecurity, a project that is very dear to my heart. It makes me very happy that I will document everything I know about it.
3. I am releasing the book early because I want to interact with the readers while the content is still not finalised. With Apache Security I ended up being terribly unhappy because I was writing in isolation and because I couldn't seek feedback from the readers prior to publication.
4. To publish this book (and all my subsequent books), my wife and I started a publishing company and dealt with all the stuff that publishers have to deal with. The learning curve wasn't very difficult because of my previous experience in publishing, but there was a lot of things to do.
5. This book will be a living book. I intend to keep it up to date at all times, keeping up with the changes in ModSecurity. We've invested a significant amount of time into polishing a single-source publishing system, where the manuscript is kept as XML (DocBook, stored in a Subversion repository) and automatically converted to any of the supported formats (only PDF at the moment, but several forms of PDF, HTML and ePub in the near future). The system allows me to make changes and push updates instantly to all the readers!

The work is far from done, of course. First, I need to finish the book, first of all. Second, we'll have to figure out how to promote it effectively, and I somehow suspect that will be the hardest part. Perhaps, when it's all done, I'll write a blog post called "Adventures in Computer Book Publishing".

Update: The official Reference Manual and Data Formats Guide guide have been added to the book. There's about 230 pages of material right now, with the final count expected to be close to or over 300.

Apache Security in Japanese!

My book was translated to Japanese and published by O'Reilly Japan! This is, apparently, old news, as they did it back in 2005, but I only found out about it from the three-monthly royalties statement I received in April.

While we are on the subject of writing, I am starting to get the itch again. There are two or three topics I would like to explore further. Topics such as web application firewalls and ModSecurity, web application security, and application security patterns. On the other hand, I have a few compelling reasons against writing another book:

1. It takes a lot of time (time better spent building Thinking Stone into a stronger business).
2. It's lonesome (but this can be dealt with by finding someone to co-author the book with me.
3. My hands and arms haven't fully recovered from the first book. (This one is the most compelling reason of all - I barely managed to finish Apache Security in the first place. If you are using keyboard extensively make sure to read about RSI and always keep Workrave active.)

Apache Security one year after

It's been exactly one year since my book, Apache Security, was published. I was very glad to learn Amazon.com is now enabling book authors to talk to their audience. It is unfortunate this feature did not exist at the time - I would have loved the opportunity to point those looking at this page to the book's web site - www.apachesecurity.net.

I have always believed publication is just a first step in the life of a book (a long step in my case, as I spent eight months writing), and that the best stuff comes only after a book has been in use for a year or two. Let's face it, we (the authors) don't know nearly as much as our collective readership does. Therefore I invite you, the reader, to send me your feedback and make the second edition of Apache Security much better!

The public life of Apache Security begins

My book, Apache Security, is finally out, after a year and a half of hard labour. I began talking to the publisher in the summer of 2003, and began research shortly after. I began writing in March 2004 and finished in December 2004. O'Reilly had it in stock on March 1st 2005, but it only become widely available in late March.

The work itself was great fun. It is a great privilege to be able to explore the boundaries of your own knowledge in detail. I did have periods of despair, of course. But I was prepared for them from reading blog entries of other book writers. I knew how difficult it was going to be. The biggest challenge I had was deciding what to cover, and what to leave out. It was never going to be a book for absolute beginners (officially, it's an "intermediate to advanced" type of book) but I didn't want to write a book that would be understood only by a few people who are already Apache experts. On an another level, it was also not possible to look at the security of the Apache web server in isolation. A book that pretends to provide "everything you need to know to secure your Apache web server" must delve into topics such as networks security, host security, and web application security. As it turned out I had to deal with these questions every single day. It was a struggle to keep the book from growing too much. Initially, the book was supposed to be around 280 pages long. In the end, it grew to over 400 pages.

As my work progressed I began to think more and more about the process. The traditional book writing process restricts the author to his experience, the experience of his immediate peers, and the experience of the technical reviewers. While this may work in some, or even many cases, I came to believe that a piece of technical writing can achieve its best only through the collaboration process with the readers. Now that the book is out, this is exactly what I am looking forward to.

The first step, the book's web site, is already completed. In the following months I plan to put more material from the book online, start adding fresh content, and generally try to engage the public by offering them the stuff they are interested in. The way I see it, my work has just began.

Apache Security cover and beta chapter available!

 The Apache Security cover will feature a horse, I am happy to say. I knew all along my book was going to be an animal book but the identity of the animal was not known until fairly recently. Now that the animal is known and the tagline ("The Complete Guide to Securing Your Apache Web Server") is sorted I decided to publish the cover for everyone to see. The official launch date is less than two weeks from now so I'll save my "it was a difficult job" speech for then.

A beta chapter, Installation and configuration, is also available for download. A part of me wanted to advertise my knowledge by giving away one of the more exciting chapters. But since properly installing and configuring Apache is very important, in the end I decided to give away the less exciting but probably more useful chapter.