Hardening Apache - Short Review

I’ve had Hardening Apache sitting on my shelves for over five years (Sep 2004 or so Amazon tells me). While I can remember dipping in to it for the Apache chroot chapter it never seemed to progress to the top of the pile, and now I’m cleaning out a lot of my old books I decided to finally give it a chance.

The book is very well written, covers a good range of subjects from building apache from source to adding extra security modules and checking its running state. Those are all good points and if I’d read the book when it came out I’d give it a very decent score, unfortunately I waited to read it.

This is a book that hasn’t aged well. The version numbers of apache mentioned, the last update times of the modules (and how many of them have fallen in to the pit of being unmaintained) and the general style of the shell scripts all just come across as very dated and prevent me from recommending this book

Well written but ravaged by time - where’s the second edition?