With distributions for both Unix and 32-bit Windows environments, the Apache Web server boasts reliability, security, and scalability—and it's free. Apache: The Definitive Guideshows Apache administrators how to perform their jobs, detailing the server through version 1.3.

The authors—one of them a member of the Apache development team—begin with an academic discussion of what Web servers do before walking the reader through the process of installing Apache. Installation gets much attention—readers find out, step by step, how to set up a Web site (or several) under Apache, and how to set up Web site security and other preferences properly. The book also provides in-depth discussions of particular aspects of Apache operation, including MIME handling, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and security features such as authentication and caching.

For the programmers in the crowd, this book documents the Apache API with discussions of resource pools and their allocation, plus a full API reference. A tutorial explains how to write Apache extension modules in C. In all matters, Apache: The Definitive Guidecovers both Unix and Win32 machines, but it places more emphasis on the Unix port. The complete source code of Apache 1.3 appears on the CD-ROM that ships with the book. —David Wall

The 1940s and 1950s were marked by an efflorescence of Melanesian cargo cult activities—periodic movements in which native people deeply believed they could attain abundant European goods (and the status that these goods seemed to assure) by ritual means. Road Belong Cargo has long been the authoritative account of the cargo phenomenon in New Guinea. Written from Lawrence's own careful research, as well as from historical records and comparable studies in anthropology and ethnohistory, this theoretically sophisticated study describes how the villagers of the Madang District sought, through religious experiment and speculation, to change a world in which they felt themselves to be the underdogs despised by the colonial masters. An excellent history of culture contact and ethnic relations over nearly eight decades, this study of people living in a tiny segment of the frontier between the industrial world and that of the village, in a long isolated corner of the world, enables readers to see five short-lived religious movements, aggravated by the rigid rule imposed by a succession of Western administrations.