This article is clearly written. It assumes you need to
customize Apache and need more than a vanilla compile. It goes into
the details of the precompile configuration options with this in
mind.
The authors are very well qualified to write on this
subject:
Mark Komarinski is a system administrator at Aurora Technologies
in Waltham, MA. He is a former Linux Journal columnist and the
author of The Linux Companion. He and Cary Collett coauthored The
Linux System Administration Handbook.
Read
compiling Apache.