Conventions Used in This Book

Throughout this book certain stylistic conventions are followed. Once you are accustomed to them, you can easily distinguish between comments, commands you need to type, values you need to supply, and so forth.

In some cases, the typeface of terms in the main text will be different and likewise in code examples. The details of what the different styles (italic, boldface, etc.) mean are described in the following sections.

Programming Conventions

In this book, most case examples of code will be in the form of excerpts from scripts, rather than actual application code. When commands need to be issued at a command-line prompt (such as an xterm for a Unixish system or a DOS command prompt for Windows), they will look something like this:

% find /usr/local -name apachectl -print
# /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl graceful
C:>cd "\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache\bin"
C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache\bin>apache -k stop

On Unixish systems, command prompts that begin with # indicate that you need to be logged in as the superuser (root username); if the prompt begins with %, then the command can be used by any user.

Typesetting Conventions

The following typographic conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Used for commands, filenames, abbreviations, citations of books and articles, email addresses, URLs, and USENET group names.

Bold

Used for labeling menu choices in a graphical interface.

Constant Width

Used for function names, command options, computer output, environment variable names, literal strings, and code examples.

Constant Width Bold 

Used for user input in computer dialogues and examples.

Constant Width Italic

Used for replaceable parameters, filesystem paths, and variable names.

This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

This icon indicates a warning or caution.

Documentation Conventions

Since this book deals with a general topic rather than a specific one (such as the Perl language), there are additional sources of information to which it will refer you. The most common ones are:

The online manual ("man") pages on a Unixish system

References to the manpages will appear something like, "For more information, see the kill(1) manpage." The number in parentheses is the manual section; you can access this page with a command such as:

% man 1 kill

The Apache web server documentation

Such a reference may appear as "See the mod_auth documentation for details." This refers to a web page like:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_auth.html

In some cases, the reference will be to a specific Apache directive rather than an actual module; in cases like this, you can locate the appropriate web page by looking up the directive name on:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/directives.html

This page lists all of the directives available in the standard Apache package. In some situations, the directive may be specific to a nonstandard or third-party module, in which case the documentation should be located wherever the module itself was found. The links above are for the documentation for Version 1.3 of the software. To access the documentation for Version 2.0, replace "docs/" with "docs-2.0/" in the URLs.