HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 656 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Edition: 1st Edition September 2002
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1565925092
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1565925090
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 1.5 inches
• Weighs: 2.3 pounds

Product Description
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 andprotocols, 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.



About The Author
David Gourley is the Chief Technology Officer of Endeca, where he leads the research and development of Endeca's products. David was a member of the founding engineering team at Inktomi, where he helped develop Inktomi's Internet search database, and was

Brian Totty is the Vice President of R&D at Inktomi Corporation. He has led the technical design and development of web caching, streaming media, and Internet search technologies since he helped found Inktomi in 1996. Marjorie Sayer writes about network c

Reader Reviews
This review is from: HTTP: The Definitive Guide (Hardcover) 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.