content: Usually purchasing an O'Reilly book on any topic is a virtual guarantee of excellence. This book is a notable exception. There are many other Apache books available, I can only encourage you to take a look at them. I have worked with Apache for several years, and this book fails me every time I turn to it for help. The on line documentation is excellent and is by far the better choice. This book skips over the essentials and the basics and wanders off to discuss odd topics that have never been of concern to me. Pretty much a waste of money and shelf space. Sometimes I do say good things, go read my review of Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan if you don't believe this.