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HTTP: The Definitive Guide
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Author: David Gourley, Brian Totty
List Price: $44.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 1565925092
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (September, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 21,235
Average Customer Rating: 4.82 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
You will be surprised of how much you don't know about HTTP
You think you may know enough HTTP, it's just a simple application level protocol eh? Hold your thought till you read this book. I borrowed this book from a library merely for doing some research on HTTP connection management and secure authentication. However, the more I read, the more I'm amazed there're lots of practical and interesting topics with so rich but not boring details. The book uses quite numbers of pictures to depict different handshaking protocols and complicated concepts, very easy to follow and understand. It is certainly not the HTTP specification reprint. It tells you what, why, where, and how. It is as the name suggested --- The Definitive Guide. This book gives you very resourceful details on how HTTP works with a wild range of topics like Caching, Proxies, Gateway, Tunneling, Web Robots, Connection Management, Cookies, Various Authentication, Security, i18n, Hosting, and even Load Balancing! For example, it addresses how web crawlers work, really the inside out information, how a web crawler can back track their visited paths and what other alternatives to prevent & resolve loops & dups.
HTTP is becoming the 'operating system' for distributed applications in Internet. No doubt in my mind, from beginners, advanced users, even to researchers, will surely be benefitted from this excellent book. The authors really did a superb job. Five Stars!
Rating: 5 out of 5
An amazing amount of information
Many web developers out there happily ignore many important things about HTTP; well, while a deep knowledge of HTTP isn't mandatory to build web-based applications, a decent understanding can be quite handy. The authors assembled and organized an amazing amount of information, really delivering a definitive, but still quite readable guide.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Really good, but....
As its name states, this book is a defintive guide. It provides in depth coverage of all important HTTP information in use today, ranging from the basic communications protocol, to cache control, proxies, and security mechanisms. It's extremely well written in clear, easy to understand terms.
The organization of the book is one reason I gave it only 4 stars instead of 5. Material on proxies, and especially cache control, was spread through the book, rather than being located in any one area. While the basics of these are important to understanding some of the considerations in writing an HTTP application, a different organizational structure may have suited the material better.
This book is still a great teaching and reference book for learning HTTP, but if you are not planning on running your own HTTP server, especially a proxy or caching server, a lot of this book is overkill. I'm sure I'll be referring to it in the future for various other kinds of HTTP information.
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