HTTP: The Definitive Guide

The HTTP protocol is the backbone protocol of the World Wide Web. If you need to understand it in all the details HTTP: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide is the easiest way how to do it.When I looked for a guide to HTTP, the only cons of this book was its age. Printed, now (2015) 13 years ago, I hesitated if the book is up-to-date. 13 years in IT is like a millennium of human history. Fortunately, my fears soon had disappeared. The book fully covers HTTP 1.1, which is still the most up-to-date version of HTTP protocol. It simply means that the book 13 years since its publication is still perfectly valid.One thing that can strike a potential buyer is the book size. The HTTP protocol is a relatively simple protocol that was designed as a human readable protocol. In fact, its basic structure can be described in few pages. So why to have 500 pages? It's because the protocol has a lot of very important subtleties that the book covers to the details. Things like TCP connection management, caching, proxies, encodings, authentications, redirection, and even Web robots are covered there. And not just covered, but described on virtually hundreds of figures. For me these figures are the best thing of the book. I can't remember the other text that would have so well-designed figures. The figures are intuitive and easy to follow. Many times they helped me to understand the following text.As a SW developer I can say, the book is not just and an excellent study material and a great manual of the protocol, but using the text, it's easy to implement your own HTTP parser with things like optimal connection management that are essential for an effective browsing.Even now in the advent of HTTP 2.0, HTTP: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide is still an essential guide to everyone who needs to understand this protocol.

My work has mostly consisted of going up to only layer 4. About 3 years ago I moved to a team where we took care of load balancers, but mainly just setting up virtual IPs for http/s, adding to pools, taking them down etc. That led me to my current position where load balancing is what my team does, but at a much deeper level than my previous experience. I needed more knowledge on layer 7, now. One of my senior team mates recommended this book based on it's content. I have to say it's been great. The book is actually readable, as opposed to most tech books. I found the information translated exactly to what I needed to know for my job. Some chapters I read just to familiarize myself, although they didn't, at this moment, pertain to my job, but the majority of this book was exactly what I needed. It is a little dated, with references to the Netscape browser, but I would say 90% or more still pertains today and if you are new to layer 7 or just want to learn more, this is the book for you. It is a thick book, over 600 pages with addendum. For those new to layer 7 and HTTP, I would suggest starting at the beginning as there are bits and pieces that help fill in the gaps. For those with layer7 and/or HTTP knowledge, it's quite easy to jump to whatever topic you're looking for.

Who would have thought you could write a 600+ page book about HTTP? The official specification itself is less than 200 pages - what else is there to say? As it turns out, quite a bit. This book traces the history of HTTP from 0.9 to the current version (1.1) and talks about the proposed HTTP-NG extensions as well. Part 1 covers the basics of HTTP: what it actually does and is for. Part 2 talks about the components that make HTTP work: servers, proxies, caches, etc. Part 3 covers HTTP security, including authentication headers and a brief overview of HTTPS. I would have liked to have seen some coverage of SSO here - SAML is close enough to HTTP as to be on topic in a book section about HTTP authentication - but they stuck with what's "baked in" to HTTP. Part 4 was my favorite part: this is where they talk about encodings, chunking, compression, internationalization, etc. This is the stuff that will get you when you're trying to deal with HTTP at a low level, and they cover it in a lot of detail, but manage to keep it interesting. Part 5, on the other hand, seemed like sort of an afterthought, which was a shame, because there was a lot of potentially great material in there. This is where they cover web publishing (as it relates to HTTP). Unfortunately, there's not much information here that you can't get from official specifications - the 30 pages they devote to WebDAV, for example, are just a dry repetition of the mechanics of WebDAV with no discussion of how it's used, or what problems you might run into trying to get it running. The final chapter on logging was OK, but again, it seemed like they could have gone into a lot more depth on actually using log files to troubleshoot problems than just telling you what was in the Apache/Netscape/Squid/etc. log files.Still, for such a long book, it's amazing that they kept their focus on HTTP so well - there's a lot of good advice and information in there. I'd recommend it to anybody who deals with the web at a technical level, from programmers to website administrators.

Although this book is very in-depth, long, and quite possibly a good cure for insomnia, any decent web app pentester would be remiss without having this great reference book in their nerd library. This book explained virtually everything I ever wanted to know about HTTP headers. It is extensive and is a technical guide, however, the author does do a good job of keeping the information light, entertaining, interesting, and informative as best as anyone could on a topic such as this. If anything, reciting the knowledge I obtained from this book (and I'm only 50% through it at the time of this review), makes my co-workers think I'm some super-nerd on the HTTP protocol. In my opinion, this is a Must Have book in your arsenal of references.

for beginning and experienced developers and IT professionals in general, this book brings the fundamentals of HTTP to a simple, straightforward basis. I recommend it without a doubt.

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This work has exhaustive information on the HTTP protocol and is easy to follow as a beginner.

Si te dedicas o piensas dedicarte al desarrollo web, es un must leer este libro. A pesar de que fue escrito hace ya varios años su contenido sigue estando vigente. Definitivamente una gran compra.

Must read for every web developer.