| Overview
Behind every web transaction lies the Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) --- the language of web browsers and servers, of portals and
search engines, of e-commerce and web services. Understanding HTTP
is essential for practically all web-based programming, design,
analysis, and administration. While the basics of HTTP are
elegantly simple, the protocol's advanced features are notoriously
confusing, because they knit together complex technologies and
terminology from many disciplines. This book clearly explains HTTP
and these interrelated core technologies, in twenty-one logically
organized chapters, backed up by hundreds of detailed illustrations
and examples, and convenient reference appendices. HTTP: The
Definitive Guide explains everything people need to use HTTP
efficiently -- including the "black arts" and "tricks of the trade"
-- in a concise and readable manner. In addition to explaining the
basic HTTP features, syntax and guidelines, this book clarifies
related, but often misunderstood topics, such as: TCP connection
management, web proxy and cache architectures, web robots and
robots.txt files, Basic and Digest authentication, secure HTTP
transactions, entity body processing, internationalized content,
and traffic redirection. Many technical professionals will benefit
from this book. Internet architects and developers who need to
design and develop software, IT professionals who need to
understand Internet architectural components and interactions,
multimedia designers who need to publish and host multimedia,
performance engineers who need to optimize web performance,
technical marketing professionals who need a clear picture of core
web architectures and protocols, as well as untold numbers of
students and hobbyists will all benefit from the knowledge packed
in this volume. There are many books that explain how to use the
Web, but this is the one that explains how the Web works. Written
by experts with years of design and implementation experience, this
book is the definitive technical bible that describes the "why" and
the "how" of HTTP and web core technologies. HTTP: The
Definitive Guide is an essential reference that no
technically-inclined member of the Internet community should be
without.
Editorial ReviewsProduct DescriptionWeb technology has become the foundation for all sorts of critical networked applications and far-reaching methods of data exchange, and beneath it all is a fundamental protocol: HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. HTTP: The Definitive Guide documents everything that technical people need for using HTTP efficiently-including the "black arts" and "tricks of the trade"-and does so in a clear and readable manner. Written by experts with years of practical and teaching experience, this book is the definitive technical bible on HTTP and related core web technologies because it clearly explains the "why" as well as the "how". A reader can understand how web applications work, how the core Internet protocols and architectural building blocks interact, and how to correctly implement Internet clients and servers. It's an essential toolkit that no technically-inclined member of the Internet community should be without. |
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Reader Reviews From Amazon (Ranked by 'Helpfulness') Average Customer Rating: based on 18 reviews. As relevant in 2009 as when it was written, 2009-05-13 Reviewer rating: Some of the existing reviews of this book go into excellent detail on how good this book is. I would like to add that while many technical books do not age well, the HTTP spec has not really changed in the past decade and the reason that this is still 'the definitive guide' is because this is so detailed there is no reason to replace it.
Still worth a read in 2009, and I suspect whenever you consider purchasing it.
| A great book, 2009-01-25 Reviewer rating: I find I'm often grabbing for this book at work, as are all of my co-workers. This is an extremely valuable book that illustrates how HTTP truly works. It is far more user-friendly than the HTTP specs, but contains just as much information.
This should be required reading for anyone who writes web applications, and recommended reading for even anyone who writes web pages. In fact, get everyone to read it except for your grandmother, and you'll make the online world a better place. | Great product, 2006-02-25 Reviewer rating: Very clear & easy to understand / logical / informative / well planned | Truly Definitive, 2005-01-07 Reviewer rating: Here's my advice: review the book's contents (you'll need to visit O'Reilly's site at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/httptdg/). Do you need a complete understanding of the topics? If so, buy this book. Everything is clearly explained in detail, with the chapters on security and internationalization being especially good. Highly recommended! | Lots of Facts, Poor Focus, 2004-10-07 Reviewer rating: This book has much of interest, and reads easily, with lots of pictures and lots of repetition. But it probably served me better than it would have someone who came to it to learn to use HTTP in Web programming. I cared more about the overviews of routers and servers and such, and the conceptual issues involving HTTP -- what it is and how it works. But to actually use it I would want some examples -- even just one example. Instead, we get a couple of random programs -- a mini-server in PERL, and a C program that sets up an HTTPS session using the OpenSSL routines (which themselves remain undefined).
The book has interesting material, but much redundancy, and much irrelevancy (chapter 19 on publishing systems is particularly worthless). Several of the appendices seem just dumps of publicly-available web sites, or, what is worse, long selections from them. The authors are good, though, about pointing to various useful web sites at chapter ends and in the appendix. But what this book really should have done, while explaining general concepts, is provide detailed documented examples, involving various configurations of client, server, router, and so on, that would illustrate exactly how HTTP is used. |
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