A later chapter deals with the idiosyncrasies of installing and configuring a news server. Part 2 is where you'll start to see lots of code, most of it Perl. Udell isn't shy about showing code, much of it clearly inspired by his work at Byte . He uses both Windows NT and Linux, IIS and Apache. The solutions presented use an eclectic mix of HTML, XML, newsgroups, e-mail, Perl, Java servlets, and Active Server Pages.
Additional chapters cover directory services, cookies, and authentication.
Udell discusses distributed HTTP as a way of providing Web services while not connected to the Internet or a local network. Udell's coverage of existing protocols reminded me that it's dumb to try to go off and create something new when there are so many existing protocols and servers and clients that work. They might not be perfect, but we can usually bend them a bit to better suit our purposes.