Customer Reviews

Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You've built a B2C or B2B web service. You get great response time from your office, but there are times when your customers across the country report poor performance.

This book with help you understand the entire path between browser and web server and how Internet latency and intermediaries like Proxy servers add to transaction delay. This is the only source that I've seen that a) Defines HTTP 1.1 and b) describes the relationship between HTTP and the TCP/IP protocol stack, making recommendations on how to tune the stack to reduce the effect of latency.

You'll learn that many of TCP's flow control mechanisms were designed for FTP, Telnet and Rlogin and some default settings are not optimized, or even appropriate for HTTP.

This is a fabulous book, technically competent, well-written, easy to read and well-organized. It comprehensively covers all the tech-weenie needs to know about clients, proxies, servers, HTTP, and a bunch more without drowning you in math or killing you softly with a gazillion irrelevant details. I found the last chapter, the "Research Perspectives," to be particularly up-to-date and useful. There is a ton of information about HTTP floating around out there. Figuratively speaking, Rexford and Krishnamurthy have taken as their input the coal and produced as their output this diamond.

This is the most comprehensive book on HTTP protocols that I have seen. It covers all related areas, such as web caching, web workloads, and most importantly, possible research directions. (though it has the bias of the authors ;-)) from the prespective of research. Moreover, it is a very timely book, you will find the bibliography of this book is very useful.

I give it the best rating for being instantly useful. It is comprehensive; buy this one first and use it for basic and advanced topics. HTTP section is especially useful. The book is timely: Multimedia and web caching are hot topics and well covered. It also forward thinking, touching on research topics for the web.

This is so totally readable and comprehensive in its scope, that it was an absolute delight. This one is a keeper and a re-read if you need to understand what the word "web" or "data" means.

This is such a great book, more than you will EVER need to know about the HTTP protocol. If you are a network Socket engineer, this book will provide you with everything you need to write your own web server and/or client.

I bought this book based upon the reviews here and elsewhere. You may wonder why I give it only three stars out of five... If I were only interested in concepts then I would've gave this book 5 stars also, but I was expecting much more than concepts. Concepts are great for an overview, but for someone like me, I was more interested in the technical aspects as to how to implement something even if it was just demonstrated with Apache. Searching the web, one could probably find all the details how to implement the concepts into real life setups.

It would have been great if a Bibliography or Reference accompanied each chapter for further details.

...but it is very thorough.

Protocol and practice.... unlike 21 days in HTML, the authors teach me something big...