Why a Webmin Book?

Though the question is perhaps of little relevance to some readers, I’ve come to the conclusion that every technical book ought to be able to convincingly answer the question of why it was written. If an author can’t answer that simple question it is quite likely the book should have never come to be, and given the alarming number of fat, empty books in the technical section at my local bookseller I’d guess that too few authors ever attempt to answer it. So, for the next few paragraphs I’m going to answer the question by explaining why a Webmin book, and more specifically a Webmin book written by me, should be on the bookshelves at your local bookseller and on the web for all to read.

I started writing the Webmin book in late 2000 for entirely selfish reasons, though reasons unrelated to making money on the book in any direct way. Some time before that in 1999 I co-founded a company to build appliance servers based on the Linux operating system and a number of other Open Source software packages. Starting Linux-based technology companies was very much the thing for nerds like me to do at the time, just as two years later it was equally popular for Linux-based technology companies to fold into bankruptcy and oblivion just as enthusiastically as they had started, if with somewhat less fanfare and revolutionary talk. The company, Swell Technology, was founded on a lot of high ideals about how a hardware vendor ought to behave toward customers and toward the Open Source community, plus a little money that I had made in the stock market before the Internet bubble burst. After all, no matter how high the ideals or how vibrant the Linux server market potential appears at the time it still takes a little money to start a company. But, unlike a lot of other Linux-based technology startups, Swell Technology still exists three years later, possibly partly because we didn’t bother with venture capital or a hyped IPO, as was the standard operating procedure for most Linux-based technology companies of the time.

In 1999 when we founded Swell, we focused on one small niche market and developed a web caching appliance product based on the previously mentioned Linux, Squid, and a still young but rapidly developing Webmin. The choice of Webmin was mostly an easy one, because at the time it was either Webmin or text editing of configuration files with vi or emacs. Luckily, Webmin was already an exceedingly solid piece of work with a quite wide feature set. So I built the product, packaged the product, marketed the product (with some help on all counts), and even sold a few of the product by the middle of 2000. I also wrote a lot of documentation, to the tune of a few hundred pages — first in LinuxDoc and then in the far more capable and flexible DocBook. However, most of this documentation was mostly written for users of our products. It contained a large amount of information that would be useful to a general reader using Webmin and not just our clients, but that information was interspersed with occasional information that was only useful to a user logged in to one of our servers. Thus, no one was reading it except our customers who, at the time, did not make an exceedingly large audience.

Also during this time, I was reading and answering questions on the Webmin mailing lists whenever I knew the answer. As on all technical mailing lists, there are questions that come up every few days or weeks no matter how many times they are answered. On some lists this is particularly annoying, because the documentation for a project usually answers those sorts of questions in vivid detail. Perhaps there is a FAQ with the answers or a nice man page. Webmin, however, had very little in the way of documentation. At the time, the Webmin FAQ consisted of about five questions and answers and online help only existed for a few modules (I had already written the online help for the Squid module and still maintain those help files today). So the questioners couldn’t simply be referred to the documentation, because there was none that answered their question. So, out of a profound desire to be lazy, I started writing a book. I’m sure there is an apparent contradiction in that statement to many readers, but probably not to anyone who regularly contributes to an Open Source project mailing list. Answering the same question half-heartedly several times is far more tiring than answering it once with the thoroughness it deserves.

So I set out to answer some of those questions with a thoroughness that I hoped would severely reduce the number of repetitive questions on the mailing list, as well as answer some of the questions I found my clients often asked about Webmin on our servers. According to my revision information I posted the first 0.01 draft on October 6, 2000 on a back corner of my personal website. It contained four chapters, none of which was more than ten pages. It covered Apache, Squid, and most of the Webmin-related configuration options. I had taken off a long weekend from Friday to Monday to write it and another couple days to figure out how to process DocBook SGML. Within three days of mentioning it on the Webmin list my book, if it could be called that in its diminutive early form, was receiving 1,000 hits and a few hundred unique visitors each day. Our company web server, where my home page is hosted, had never seen that much traffic in its entire existence. Interesting. Free stuff draws visitors, and free, useful stuff draws a lot of visitors. This discovery was very exciting for me because, as a devout capitalist and businessman, I like to give stuff away. Or maybe I’m merely a little less than humble and enjoy knowing folks have read my book and find it useful. Either way, I enjoyed the popularity my book was gaining among Webmin users.

A lot of people seemed to like the early versions of the book, and I was enjoyingwriting it because it gave me a structured way to learn a lot of things that I didn’t already know and reinforced things I did. Thus, the book grew whenever I had a weekend to spare and a subject that I wanted to write about. Somewhere along the way, I began to receive requests to buy the book, and as the book grew these requests came more frequently. So in a fit of brilliance unmatched by any of my previous intellectual revelations (which number in the hundreds on a good day), I decided to publish the book myself.

I began the process of preparing it for printing via a print-on-demand publisher and trying to figure out all of the complexities of transferring digital words onto paper cost-effectively and with a high-quality resulting product. Luckily, this madness was interrupted by a phone call from Bill Pollock of No Starch Press, a real book publisher with a well-earned reputation for quality production, who was interested in publishing a book about Webmin. He had spoken to Jamie Cameron who referred him to me as a possible choice for doing the writing. After a brief discussion about licensing (because I insisted on being able to offer a free version on my website) we came to an agreement. Several months later by way of magic and editors and printers this book has found its way to your local bookseller with an attractive cover and in a nice binding. Or I suppose I should say I think it will find its way to your local bookseller with an attractive cover and nice binding . . . one can never be sure about the future. It was a brief discussion, because I’ve been a fan of No Starch since reading The Book of JavaScript by Thau! with its brilliant cover design and very nice presentation overall. Also, the terms of the boilerplate contract were quite fair and more generous than most similar agreements from other publishers. Adding Bill’s immediate agreement to allow me to publish a free version online, it was a quick and painless process. If all publishers were this nice to work with, I would probably become a full-time writer and rid myself of the complexities and uncertainties of running a business in a highly volatile market.

Now that the story of the book and how it came to be is out, I will wrap up by saying I hope you enjoy my first book and find it a valuable addition to your bookshelf. I’ve attempted, with possibly varying degrees of success, to strike a balance between a comprehensive reference to the options found in Webmin and a valuable learning tool for UNIX and Webmin users who may not have extensive system administration experience. More succinctly, I hope this book answers your questions.