Modules Book: New Edition

I have been asked if I plan a second edition of the Apache Modules Book.

The existing book was motivated by my perception of a big gap in the market.  The book filled that gap, and substantially still does: I believe it can still help a developer up the learning curve to working with our server!  However, things have moved on since publication, and a book for HTTPD 2.4 should ideally cover additional topics, as well as revise some of the existing contents.

If there is to be a second edition, I believe it should be a multi-author work.  For me to revisit it in isolation would be sure to produce something rather stale, particularly when revising old contents.  So the first question: who is interested in principle in contributing to a multi-author effort?

If there is sufficient interest in a second edition, I can contact my publisher and ask if they're interested.  Unfortunately I think my editor has moved on, so I don't know who I'll be dealing with.  If they're interested then I think they have a right of first refusal, although obviously that doesn't apply if someone else takes the lead and writes a new book rather than a second edition.

Questions

  • Is there a need for an updated modules book?
  • Who will contribute?
  • Should it substantially re-use the existing book?
  • Other things being equal, should the primary medium be online or traditional?
  • Should we determine now that royalties go to ASF rather than haggle among members of a team?

Contents

New significant topics

What's essential vs nice to have vs superfluous?

  • Proxy/Balancer Framework and Clustering (whole chapter)
  • New IPC with slotmem and socache
  • Expression parser, regexp support
  • SSL (whole chapter?)
  • apreq
  • dav???
  • ldap
  • lua (whole chapter)
  • Protocol modules (whole chapter)
  • MPMs and platform/arch modules (whole chapter)

Overhauls most needed

From memory:

  • Update APR to reflect 2.0 and APR/APU merger
  • AAA - another overhaul
  • Config, to reflect <if>
  • DBD chapter is outdated. Possibly reduce it?

Question: how to organise topics too small to merit a whole chapter? Chapter 4 of the existing book covers a bunch of them, but is not really a very satisfactory way to organise them.