HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Rating:
Summary: Really good, but....
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Manque d'information
Review: Ce livre manque de contenu et l'auteur se répète beaucoup (ne vous laissez pas impressioner par le nombre de pages).
En fait, il y a beaucoup d'information assez générale, mais à mon avis pas suffisamment pour développer un serveur, par exemple.
En particulier, il n'y a pas d'information (ou presque!) concernant les POST. Un "oubli" quelque peu surprenant pour un ouvrage de cette envergure.
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Very few information about form submission.

Rating:
Summary: A wealth of development and application tips
Review: Collaboratively written by HTTP experts David Gourley and Brian Totty (with the additional assistance of Marjorie Sayer, Sailu Reddy, and Anshu Aggarwal), HTTP: The Definitive Guide is a thorough and "reader friendly" introductory presentation of HTTP protocol, how it works, and how it is used to create webpages and to develop web-based applications. A wealth of development and application tips, tricks, techniques, as well as cogent strategies for optimizing proxies and caches, creating robots and web crawlers, crafting secure HTTP applications, and much, much more are featured in this highly recommended and truly extensive guide which packed with numerous and illustrative examples ideal for aspiring web programmers, administrators, and application developers.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Definitive
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, accessible and well written
Review: HTTP: the Definitive Guide is a comprehensive view of the plumbing of the web. There are enough gory details to satisfy the hungriest of developers (it's becoming a standard reference where I work), but where the book really shines is in how it presents a coherent overview of all the elements of modern web infrastructure and how they fit together. The book is very well written in that each chapter is independently accessible on an as-needed basis, yet hangs together as a coherent whole as well. For example, I needed to get a quick (re)-education on redirection; I was able to get what I needed from that chapter quickly and easily, with the pros and cons of various approaches laid out in an easy to grasp manner. The material on caching is also particularly meaty (unsurprising given the author's backgrounds). Managers, executives and IT professionals who need to become fully "buzzword compliant" will also find this book surprisingly accessible and informative.

Rating:
Summary: Very useful!
Review: I bought this book to gain some deeper insight into HTTP. I am employed as a web developer, granting me knowledge of all layers above HTTP. I was once employed as a low-level engineer, granting me knowledge of networks and protocols (TCP/IP). I was still missing knowledge of HTTP though. This tiny pocket reference is a wealth of information. Well-organized and seemingly very complete, with examples at just the right times in just the right amount. While reading this I decided to write a small personal webserver, just to get my feet wet and learn quicker. This little reference was all I needed to put my own HTTP server up (and I tossed in a complete CMS, just for the heck of it). It's no tutorial, but as a reference it is great and lives up to it's intended goals completely!

Rating:
Summary: The only book of its kind!
Review: I had never thought of HTTP in such a broad scale before I read "HTTP::The Definitive Guide". Apparently, Web sites and Web browsers are not the only things that should come to mind when one thinks of HTTP. Flexibility of the protocol made it home for so many breakthroughs of the Internet. It's amazing that there were no comprehensive textbooks covering the topic until today.

Organizing such enormous data in a 500-line book is a challenge already. But authors managed to go even beyond. The result was a well organized, comprehensive and amazingly easy to follow book.

The book is organized into 6 large sections. Each section is split into Chapters. Wherever appropriate, authors use figures and diagrams to illustrate the point.

The first section, called "Web's Foundation" covers most of the things an average web developer may already have known. It starts off with a chapter on HTTP Overview, and covers such topics as URLs, HTTP Messages - requests and responses, connections - parallel, persistent and pipeline. Some of the highlights are HTTP versions and their differences, URL conversion algorithms and status codes.

The second section, called "HTTP Architecture", is probably the most informative section with lots of gory details. It discusses existing technologies that make things happen - players of the Web. Starts with Web Servers that actually serve the original content. Takes you step by step what exactly happens once the Server accepts the request from your browser and displays you the page. Other technologies, such as Proxies, Caching, Gateways, Tunnels and Relays are very well covered. They even talk about Web Robots (a.k.a. Crawlers) and allocate over 30 exciting pages on these both annoying and incredibly useful "creatures". The section is finished with a brief overview of HTTP-NG, also called "Next Generation HTTP".

"Identification, Authorization, and Security" is the next section, that talks about just that. Detailed coverage on Cookies, Basic and Digestion Authentication available. Walks you through the architecture of HTTPS, a.k.a SSL/TLC and algorithms used.

Fourth section is on Encoding, Internationalization and Content Negotiation.

Fifth section is on Content Publishing and Distribution. Types of web hosting and Publishing systems - all covered. Also allocated good deal of time on explaining Redirections and Load Balancing - very useful topic. Wraps up the discussion with a chapter on Logging and Usage tracking.

Last, over 100 pages of the book are all useful Appendixes.

If you really want to understand how the Web really works (I mean, really), this is a "must have" book.

Rating:
Summary: EASY LIFE FOR WEB PROGRAMMERS
Review: If you are looking for a comprehensive book with thorough coverage of HTTP, take a break now. You have found one. Congratulations!
This well-structured guide provides a superior analysis of both HTTP Protocol and its method of defining all those rules that our Webs obey.
Using the very concept of Web technologies which HyperText Transfer Protocol, (HTTP), supports, David Gourley and his colleagues explained all those behind-the-scene principles that make this protocol the universal wonder that it is today.
There is hardly any essential HTTP information that is not in this book. Even the very latest technologies, as well as their subsequent Web applications are included.
"HTTP: The Definitive Guide" is one reliable companion, that will make life easy for Web Programmers.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing amount of information
Review: 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:
Summary: Lots of Facts, Poor Focus
Review: 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.