Wow, this is awesome! Many CS grads I've worked with before had little experience of any web technologies or concepts coming out of school, which makes it that much harder to get them up to speed. I quickly realized I can't take for granted that someone would know source code version control, or understand protocols like HTTP and POP3 or how to telnet into them for debugging. Definitely bookmarking this for future use!
This particular book was just finished two or three years ago, although it builds upon materials written in the 1990's.
It seems his attachment to AOLServer and Oracle are because they still work, and he personally has no reason to switch.
Most of what I know about web programming I learned from Philip, though I have had only brief exposure to AOLServer and Oracle. What he's teaching transcends particular technologies, and it's fairly straightforward to apply it to, say, Apache+Python and PostGreSQL.
Hey, AOLserver is open source. At the time it was the only web server with a built-in glue language (Tcl) and pooled database connections. It got me excited about web programming. Plus, the sheer amount of code already written was fantastic.
I never understood why people were put off by his favoritism to those tools. ACS was all about page flow and user experience, and in that department, got it right more often than not.
