This book is perfect for programmers AND webmasters! Before reading this book I had very limited knowledge of what mod rewrite was or how it worked. After I finished it I was able to:

1. Make search engine friendly URLs (dynamically generated by my site) work.

2. Block bad bots and remote file inclusion attempts.

3. Rename pages or move them seamlessly.

I would recommend this book to anyone, it was easy to understand even from the point of view of someone just starting out.

The freely available online documentation for mod_rewrite is a great deal more "definitive" than this book could ever hope to be, but it's also a great deal more difficult to navigate and read. This book is considerably more human friendly and un-man-page-like, and even if it doesn't contain a specific solution for your particular problem, it will at least point you in the right direction so you have some general idea of where to look in the official docs.

I was very disappointed with this book. The information inside is so basic and cursory that you're bound to quickly run into situations more advanced than the contents can cover.

For instance, it doesn't deal at all with using a rewritemap within a rewritecond, and it only gives one small paragraph to rewritecond backreferences. I've spent the last few weeks scouring the internet for details about mod_rewrite, and there's very little documentation.

This book, at most, aggregates that documentation in one place. To call it the "definitive guide" is a bit much.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite by Rich Bowen leaves nothing to be desired. After pointing out when not to use mod_rewrite, a chapter on regular expressions and one on installing and configuring mod_rewrite (both statically and as a dynamic object), the author digs right in to the RewriteRule directive with clear examples for doing simple and more complex redirection. Chapter five expands on those rules with the RewriteCond directive illustrating its strength with time-based redirection (different pages day & night) and how to solve the "image theft" problem, and chapter six lays out the RewriteMap directive which allows to map URLs based on external data; I again found some very good examples here.

The next two chapters cover real-world examples which include adjusting URLs, reorganization of content, forcing SSL, and serving content based on a username. Access control, virtual hosts (yes, using mod_rewrite!), proxying and debugging make up the remaining chapters which are packed full of information (a lot of which I didn't know about).

I think that The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite really is just that: definitive. It is a must have for any systems administrator who wants to use mod_rewrite on an Apache web server, and I strongly recommend it.

Apache is the most commonly employed web server software on the Internet. While it is powerful and flexible out of the box your needs may require more advanced security, virtual web servers, flexibility or other items that can easily be changed. The ability to use mod_rewrite allows you to rewrite your URL in many ways so that it works the way you want it to. Among its other capabilities it allows you to set up Mass Virtual Hosting and rearrange your site with ease. And for those of us who love the Linux world the use of regular expressions allows a lot of flexibility. Some of the more powerful features include the ability to use conditional rewrites (the content is different based on usernames), force users to enter the site only through the main page, limit user access to particular directories, prevent spider access, and prevent image theft. The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite is a highly recommended introduction to this very popular but vastly under-documented program.