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HTTP Developer's Handbook
One of the strangest feelings I've ever had reading a book is that I have a better opinion of it than does the author. Shiflett spends most of the introduction convincing the reader that this is a useful book and it seems that the start of most chapters is another few sentences telling me why the chapter is incredibly useful for me to read. I felt like yelling "I'm convinced, I'm convinced."
The book is broken up into 6 parts: 'Introducing HTTP,' 'HTTP Definition,' 'Maintaining State,' 'Performance,' 'Security,' and 'Evolution of HTTP.'
The first section and a large part of the introduction are the sort of information that is covered elsewhere in just as good a detail: it basically covers the obvious. The second section covers the HTTP protocol itself, with a good discussion of requests and responses, including all the nitty gritty details of the headers in some detail. This is the really useful heart of the book and it covers 80 of the 280 pages. The third, fourth and fifth sections give a too-concise look at their subject matter, I felt the book could have given much more detail here. The last section is a waste of space; in this volume I don't really need to have a small amount of information about SOAP and XML-RPC.
This book is well-written; I believe its two fatal flaws are that Shiflett seems unsure of his own book and that the book itself tries to offer everything for a developer while explaining it all for the newcomer. I think that had Shiflett given up on the newcomer and given the developer greater depth (with a lot more examples) he would have delivered a much better book. For a developer, the volume is much too light on example code, the book is not really 'practical,' more 'informative.'
This might be a good volume for a library, either a corporate or school library. It provides the salient information in one spot in a concise and readable manner. I think that an individual might find it a less than totally useful book for the money -- you're likely to have already have a volume or two that covers most of the information, and with most languages in web development having libraries that take care of most of the low-level stuff for you, it becomes less and less necessary to really understand the bottom level. Personally, I'll keep it for the 80 page section on the HTTP definition so I have it all in one spot.
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HyperTextTransferProtocol
this was a great book as an overview, and as a quick reference for details on http headers.
it's eminently readable, and while I agree w the reviewer that it's light on examples, the writing is clear enough that in most cases, examples would be redundant.
very little filler and very readable, easy to read in 1 or 2 sittings and come away with a much better handle on the underpinnings and details of the request/response model. the web is not as well understood by page authors / web developers as it should be, and this is an excellent book to help remedy the situation.
I give it a solid 7/10 and am glad I read it.
it's within easy reach on my shelf....
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
There it is, one of the huge misconceptions. Web developers write code (most of them anyway, some of us do both)... it's the web designers who would be better off with a basic grasp of graphic design. That's like telling an electrical engineer that he should take some sculpting classes.
Same link minus the ccats-20 crap. Why bother to even post anonymously?/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672324547
Morphing Software
- IE's disasterous handling of mime types and Content-Disposition
- Bug in IE client that was dropping packets. I had to view HTTP packets in ethereal to figure that one out
I found O'Reilly's HTTP: The Definitive Guide, 2002 invaluable for solving the first problem."No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I reported ccats-20 to Amazon spam police, saying his link overwhelmed the message boards. So the money amount he made is probably declining heavily right now towards $0.00.
I appreciate the honest feedback, and I'd like to address a few concerns/criticisms/whatever that I have seen mentioned.
Convincing the reader of the importance of HTTP - The first few pages do focus a lot on explaining why HTTP is important to a Web developer. Just look at all of the comments that mention how knowing HTTP is useless, and you can hopefully see why I think this is important. I see questions on various mailing lists all the time that reflect a general lack of knowledge in this area; developers don't really understand cookies, when SSL is needed (or what it does), how to secure their sessions (or applications in general), how to keep up with data from one page to the next, and all sorts of things.
The book caters to beginners - I want the book to cater to both the beginner and the experienced developer. HTTP isn't rocket science, and it can provide a great foundation for Web developers to build from. For those who are already experienced, the book can provide a good reference to the protocol (if you're experienced, you should also know that RFC 2616 isn't a substitute for this) and can help people gain a deeper understanding of things they already know a little about. I don't think a book has to confuse the reader to be considered advanced, and I wasn't writing to impress anyone. My approach was to try and help as many people as I could.
Learn Dreamweaver, not HTTP - Well, people with this opinion might be a lost cause, but what happens when your next place of employment thinks FrontPage is the only way to write Web applications? In general, I think it is better to teach people fundamental things and let them apply those things in any way that they want.
I also have a companion Web site for the book at http://shiflett.org/books/http-developers-handbook .
Uhm ... you're forgetting something, I think.
HTTP has nothing to do with HTML, really. Dreamweaver obscures HTML; it has absolutely nothing to do with HTTP.
HTTP is the protocol by which files are transfered over the world wide web, it can be anything from images to music to HTML files.
Knowing in-depth the protocol information, as this book seems to try to teach, one can use languages such as PHP to specify additional headers for various effects. Have you ever seen pages that seem to be dynamic (php or cgi), and yet they send an image file? What about the ones that are used for cgi-based site counter images? Or, for that matter, link-tracking of file downloads (I think PHPNuke does this) - All of these types of scripts require at least a rudimentary knowledge of HTTP protocol headers.
I found the HTTP Pocket Reference to be an incredibly useful book in those times when you just have to know what that status code or header means. There is enough explanation in this book that it can be used as a guide to HTTP.
Patriotism is the opium of the masses
You can use this one to support the author (me):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672324547Or, here is the plain link (it's not cheaper; you just give Amazon more money):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672324547This book could be a good help. HTTP Developer's Handbook from SAMS gives you a great deal of information about the protocol
You can buy the book
OR
You can read the documentation of RFC 2616 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 and save some money.
You can also read: HTTP/1.1 Specifications
Easy to understand and best of all FREE!!