Mastering Nginx by Dimitri Aivaliotis - Book review

Our team has been using nginx for several years, but nobody on our team could say "I know nginx well". Over the years we've been adapting snippets from the nginx wiki and random blog posts, and the often inconsistent structure of our config files reflects this trial-and-error approach. Every 6 months I go on Amazon and see if anyone's written a well-written nginx overview that covers most of the important modules and directives, and includes sample config files to teach best practices. Although there's 2 previous packt books available, their terrible reviews make it clear they're no better than 90% of the schlock that Packt publishes.

Fortunately, Mastering Nginx by Dimitri Aivaliotis couldn't be more different. At 348 carefully-written and edited pages, it manages to provide a great overview to technically-inclined beginners, while covering a lot of advanced topics you'll meet in production. It's telling that one of the technical reviewers is Andrew Alexeev, a co-founder of nginx and the author of the nginx chapter of The Architecture Of Open Source Applications.

As I run a Drupal shop, I was happy to see that it includes meaningful coverage of reverse proxies, php-fpm, and even Drupal specifically. Additionally, I learned a lot looking over the sections on memory tuning, access logs for debugging, and SSL. Based on a quick skim, I can confidently say that this book will teach you a lot about nginx, both as tutorial and reference. It's now mandatory reading for anyone on our team who will ever touch an nginx config file.

Disclosure: I don't generally like Packt books, except awesome ones like Drupal 7 Module Development and Apache Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server. Also, I don't have an affiliate account with amazon.com.