HTTP: The Definitive Guide

HTTP: The Definitive Guide

by David Gourley (Author)

Synopsis

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.

$45.46

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More Information

Format: paperback
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Published:

ISBN 10: 1565925092
ISBN 13: 9781565925090

Media Reviews
I think this book is an extremely useful, very comprehensive and clearly-written reference to all aspects of the internals of the Web going well beyond just the bare mechanics of HTTP. Even where its huge detail does stop on a topic, there are extensive and useful references for further reading on each topic covered given at the end of nearly every chapter. - John Collins, News@UK, March 2003
Author Bio
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. 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 Internetsearch database, and was a key developer of Inktomi's web caching products. Marjorie Sayer writes about network caching software at Inktomi Corporation. Sailu Reddy writes about network caching software at Inktomi Corporation. Anshu Aggarwal is a Director of Engineering at Inktomi.