HTTP the Definitive Guide  (English, Paperback, Reddy Sailu)

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.

About The Author
David Gourley 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.

Brian Totty 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.

Anshu Aggarwal is the Chief Technology Officer of Edison Carter Incorporated where he leads the research and development of ECI's products. Anshu was a member of the founding team that built the Inktomi web caching product and the Director of Engineering of the Inktomi Edge product group.

Sailu Reddy currently leads the development of embedded performance enhancing HTTP proxies at Inktomi Corp. Since 1995, he has led the design and development of various web infrastructure projects at Netscape and Inktomi.

Table of Contents

HTTP: The Web's Foundation
   Chapter 1 Overview of HTTP
   Chapter 2 URLs and Resources
   Chapter 3 HTTP Messages
   Chapter 4 Connection Management

HTTP Architecture
    Chapter 5 Web Servers
    Chapter 6 Proxies
    Chapter 7 Caching
    Chapter 8 Integration Points: Gateways, Tunnels, and Relays
    Chapter 9 Web Robots
    Chapter 10 HTTP-NG

Identification, Authorization, and Security
    Chapter 11 Client Identification and Cookies
    Chapter 12 Basic Authentication
    Chapter 13 Digest Authentication
    Chapter 14 Secure HTTP

Entities, Encodings, and Internationalization
    Chapter 15 Entities and Encodings
    Chapter 16 Internationalization
    Chapter 17 Content Negotiation and Transcoding

Content Publishing and Distribution
    Chapter 18 Web Hosting
    Chapter 19 Publishing System
    Chapter 20 Redirection and Load Balancing
    Chapter 21 Logging and Usage Tracking

Appendixes
    Appendix A URI Schemes
    Appendix B HTTP Status Codes
    Appendix C HTTP Header Reference
    Appendix D MIME Types
    Appendix E Base-64 Encoding
    Appendix F Digest Authentication
    Appendix G Language Tags
    Appendix H MIME Charset Registry

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