HTTP Developer's Handbook

honestpuck writes "To say that understanding HTTP is crucial for web development might seem like saying water is wet, yet many people don't take the time to fully understand the protocol. This book could be a good help. HTTP Developer's Handbook from SAMS gives you a great deal of information about the protocol in a clearly understood fashion." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review. HTTP Developer's Handbook author Chris Shiflett pages 280 publisher Developer's Library/SAMS rating 6 - Serious flaws reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0672324547 summary Mixed volume with fair look at HTTP protocol

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.

You can purchase HTTP Developer's Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

w3c

[stonebeat.org]

why would i wanna "buy" a book, that has info that is already available on http://www.w3c.org?
You can also join the W3c mailing lists to get in-depth info on any of the technology stacks.

Re:w3c

[Frymaster]

what the hell would a book about HTTP teach you, that you cant already get for free at w3c?

do you work for the riaa or something?

people buy books (and cd's) even though they can be garnered free over the 'net because:

1. they are easy to read
2. they are more portable
3. they look good on yr shelf
4. they are immutable. a book doesn't 404 you suddenly

Not surprising the author didn't know his niche...

[Ratface]

If you think about it there are very few people who actually *need* to get down and dirty with the HTTP protocol itself. OK - most of those who do are probably reading this and I'll be shouted down, but in reality there aren't that many people who'll be jumping up and down saying "Wow! All I ever wanted to know about HTTP!!".

HTTP knowledge required?

[nepheles]

I'm not convinced that web-developers need a knowledge of HTTP. Even sessions can be handled very transparently with newer web-dev languages/dialects like PHP and JSP. Sure, it is a benefit to have an understanding, but the average developer is better off putting his work into understanding Dreamweaver or Photoshop.

Web-development does not require a knowledge of HTTP, and this is the way it should be. You shouldn't need to understand ASCII, etc., to use a word-processor.

Re:HTTP knowledge required?

[JimDabell]

I'm not convinced that web-developers need a knowledge of HTTP.

For hobby sites, no. For proper sites, definitely. Far too many people build a site without any understanding of how the browser talks to the server. Common mistakes include:

• Thinking web statistics are reliable.
• Wasting bandwidth by massive amounts
• Slowing down sites by not being able to take advantage of HTTP pipelining, more efficient caching, etc.
• Thinking the Referer and User-Agent headers are reliable.
• Trusting request variables.
• Serving different content to different clients without providing a Vary header (in other words, letting caches screw things up).

It's not a trivial topic that can be glossed over. You could literally waste gigabytes of bandwidth a month on a high profile site (or single slashdotting) if you don't pay attention to the interaction between server and client. While it's certainly possible to build a site without knowing the first thing about HTTP, it shouldn't be encouraged.

As always, "a good reference"

[goldspider]

Not to troll here, but why does every book review here conclude with the reviewer's assertion that the book they reviewed is a good reference?

After reading the mostly-negative review, how am I supposed to believe that it is in fact "a good volume"? The reviewer even says that most people would find it to be a waste of money!

What does it take for a reviewer to come out and declare "THIS BOOK ISN'T WORTH THE PAPER IT IS PRINTED ON"??

Just write your own web server

[joshv]

Just write your own web server, in whatever language. You will become intimately familiar with the HTTP protocol. That is if you implement form processing, cookies, and multi-part encodings and such.

-josh

Far too many web developers....

[wowbagger]

Far too many web developers forget what the FIRST T stands for....

HTML may be playing a bigger role ..

[igorko]

Sure, some developers won't grasp HTTP is a stateless protocol. Others remain ignorant of the fact it's trivial to spoof and continue to rely on the the refferer as means of session tracking. But that's not where the big problems are. They lie in misuse of HTML.

1. most people use it to "design pages", not represent data. H1, H2 .. tags are miserably neglected (in favour of, say, FONT). Flash, on the other hand, is used where it shouldn't be.

2. small fonts (guess what: verdana is NOT cool), sans-serif for main text, low-contrast hard-to-read colors, and so on.

3. propriatery HTML (say IE 6.0+ only), fixed-resolution design

and many other bugs of the sort. Reading W3C's HTML 4.01 & CSS2 specifications and some usability guides (www.useit.com) should be more insightful than following up on HTTP headers. What works for me is knowing it's stateless, what this means, cookies and url rewriting, and SSL/TSL. The only time I used cleancut HTTP was when testing certain servers via telnet 80.

Verisign and networksolutions are an additional problem, but that's another story altogether.

For a webdesigner, the protocol details are of little use. There are more important things to study.
-i