HTTP: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide (Definitive Guides) 1st Edition

by David Gourley (Author), Brian Totty (Author), Marjorie Sayer (Author),

90 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1565925090

ISBN-10: 1565925092

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

is the Chief Technology Officer of Endeca, where he leads the research and development of Endeca's knowledge navigation products. Prior to working at Endeca, David designed and developed core components of Inktomi's Internet-scale search database and was a senior developer of Inktomi's web caching products. David earned a B.A.in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

was a member of Inktomi Corporation's founding engineering team, and served as Inktomi's Vice President of R&D where he co-developed Inktomi's search engine database, and led the development of Inktomi's web caching and streaming media technologies. Formerly, he was a scientist at Silicon Graphics and at Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group. Brian Totty has received several awards for research and teaching excellence, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a B.S. in Computer Science from M.I.T.

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Product details

Publisher : O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (October 22, 2002)
Language : English
Paperback : 656 pages
ISBN-10 : 1565925092
ISBN-13 : 978-1565925090
Item Weight : 2.28 pounds
Dimensions : 7 x 1.4 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #567,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #126 in Client-Server Networking Systems
- #220 in Web Services
- #274 in JavaScript Programming (Books)

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90 ratings

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J. Noor

Great for the fundamentals but showing its age

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2018

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This book was purchased as a refresher on the fundamentals of http. To that end, it is excellent, and recommended. Some areas, however, clearly show their age. Telnet and Pearl, for example, are almost obsolete in web development these days. Furthermore, http/2 is the current standard. On the other hand, this book teaches you what’s going on underneath the hood, which makes alot of those details irrelevant. Http will dominate the web indefinitely, regardless of any fancy additions to the protocol. No regrets.

7 people found this helpful

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Timmy_A

Highly recommended

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2015

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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.

15 people found this helpful

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Rob53

A must have book for serious web app pentesters

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2016

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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.

3 people found this helpful

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Joshua Davies

Comprehensive and well written

Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2011

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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.

6 people found this helpful

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Marcin Dancewicz

Everything you want to know about HTTP

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 30, 2013

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This book is what it says. It describes every detail about HTTP and even more. Very useful for developers these days, however it might be too much if you're looking for just an introduction.

4 people found this helpful

Salatiel

Un must para cualquier desarrollador web

Reviewed in Mexico on April 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

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.

2 people found this helpful

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Cliente Amazon

libro de cabecera

Reviewed in Spain on March 24, 2018

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Ha resultado el mejor y más completo libro sobre el tema que he leído. Se ha convertido en libro de consulta obligatoria. Entregado en tiempo. Un precio excelente para lo obtenido.

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Francesco Pezzella

Well written, organized and understandable

Reviewed in Italy on January 28, 2015

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Although this is a technical book, the style adopted by its author is very clear and understandable.
Even if apparently simple, HTTP hides a lot under the hood and this book does an excellent job unveiling all the nitty gritty details.
The explanation of the RFC-defined big picture always goes side by side with the "real" implementations and the "living standards" used in the industry.
A reprint to handle HTTP 2.0/SPDY is desirable.

One person found this helpful

Gregor Theis

Super Einführung in H.T.T.P, klasse geschrieben

Reviewed in Germany on April 22, 2003

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"H.T.T.P. The Definitive Guide" ist DIE Einführung in das Hyper Text Tranfer Protocol schlechthin. Selbst wenn man auch "nur" CGIs programmiert, wird man in diesem Buch eine Menge lernen. Der Stil ist sehr lesbar und humorvoll. Mir haben auch die vielen guten Abbildungen sehr gefallen, die einem die Zusammenhänge (und besonders die zeitliche Abfolge) von Aktionen klar machen.
Ich habe in diesem Buch viel gelernt. Endlich hat mir jemand MIME erklärt (und ich es auch verstanden).
Das Hyper Text Tranfer Protocol in den Versionen 1.0 und 1.1 (0.9 wird nicht verwendet und nur kurz angesprochen) hatte ich immer als sehr einfach verstanden. Jetzt weiß ich, dass ich die Finger von einer Neuimplementierung weglassen werde und mir immer Bibliotheken zu diesem Thema (z.B. Perl LWP) suchen werde. Die Anzahl und die Semantik der verschiedenen Header Attribute ist erschreckend hoch. Hut ab vor den Apache und Squid Entwicklern, die zu diesem Thema super Software entwicklen.
Das Buch behandelt das Thema sehr umfassend. Unter anderem werden folgende Themen behandelt (sehr intensiv):
- URLs (diesmal richtig erklärt, inklusive der Hintergrund Informationen)
- TCP im Zusammenhang mit dem Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (z.B. warum die persistent connections von Version 1.1 so gut für die Performance sein können)
- Der Basis Ablauf eines H.T.T.P. Requests mit den verschiedenen Bearbeitungsstufen
- Proxy Server und Caching (komplexe Materie, da Header rewrites stattfinden müssen)
- Web Robots (vor allem, worauf man aufpassen muss, wenn man einen solchen entwickelt)
- Cookies (Anwendung, Kodierung usw., sehr verständlich)
- Authentifizierung (einfach und mit MD5 Kodierung)
- H.T.T.P.S. und seine Eigenschaften bzw. Anwendung
- MIME Kodierung für die einzelnen Objekte
Nach diesem Buch wird man auch die verschiedenen Schritte in der Abarbeitung eines Requests in Apache besser verstehen (und sicherlich leichter ein Apache Modul entwickeln können).
Für alle die mit H.T.T.P. zu tun haben (sei es als CGI Programmierer, Web Server Administrator, Netzwerk Administrator oder Web Service Entwickler) kann ich das Buch sehr empfehlen. Der Umfang des Buches mag zuerst abschrecken, aber das Thema ist nun einmal nicht ganz einfach und die Coverage sehr gut.

7 people found this helpful

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