Nginx-Essentials.pdf

2006 was an exciting year. The disappointment that surrounded the dot-com crash had pretty much been superseded by a renewed and more confident growth of Web 2.0 and inspired a search for technologies of a new age. At that time, I was looking for a web server to power my projects that would do many things in a different way. After getting some experience in large-scale online projects, I knew that the popular LAMP stack was suboptimal and sometimes did not solve certain challenges, such as efficient uploads, geo-dependent rate limiting, and so on. After trying and rejecting a number of options, I came to know about Nginx and immediately felt that my search was over. It is small yet powerful, with a clean code base, good extensibility, relevant set of features, and a number of architectural challenges solved. Nginx definitely stood out from the crowd! I immediately got inspired and felt some affinity to this project. I tried participating in the Nginx community, learned, shared my knowledge, and contributed as much as I could. With time, my knowledge of Nginx grew. I started to get consultancy requests and have been capable of addressing quite sophisticated cases. After some time, I realized that some of my knowledge might be worth sharing with everyone. That's how I started a blog at www.nginxguts.com . A blog turned out to be an author-driven medium. A more reader-focused and more thorough medium was in demand, so I set aside some time to assemble my knowledge in the more solid form of a book. That's how the book you're holding in your hands right now came into existence.