"HTTP: The Definitive Guide"
O'Reilly and Associates

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Welcome to the home page for the book "HTTP: The Definitive Guide", a bible of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, published by O'Reilly and Associates. If you purchase the book from this Amazon.com link, the authors will get a small referral stipend.

Book Description

The authors clearly explain HTTP and related core technologies, in twenty-one logically-organized chapters, backed up by hundreds of detailed illustrations and examples. HTTP: The Definitive Guide explains everything people need to use HTTP efficiently --- including the "black arts" and "tricks of the trade" --- and does so in a concise, and readable manner.

While the basics of HTTP are elegantly simple, the many advanced features are notoriously confusing, because they knit together complex technologies and terminology from many disciplines. In addition to explaining the basic HTTP features, this book discusses in depth important (but often misunderstood) topics, including: 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 HTTP traffic redirection. HTTP: The Definitive Guide also provides convenient appendices for essential and hard-to-find reference material. And throughout all the material, the authors are careful to explain the "why" in addition to the "how".

With this book, you can understand how web applications work, how the core Internet protocols and architectural building blocks interact, and how to correctly implement Internet clients and servers. 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 interactive 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 painstakingly-organized wisdom packed in this volume.

There are many books that explain how to use the Web, but this is the book that explains how the Web works. Written by experts with years of expert design and implementation experience, this book is the definitive technical bible on HTTP and related core web technologies. HTTP: The Definitive Guide is an essential reference that no technically-inclined member of the Internet community should be without.

Behind every successful web transaction lies the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) --- the language of web browsers and servers, of enterprise portals and search engines, of e-commerce and web services. Understanding HTTP is essential for practically all web-based programming, design, analysis, and administration.

About the Authors

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.

Dr. 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, where he designed and optimized software for high-performance networking and supercomputing systems. Before that, he held an engineering position 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.

Marjorie Sayer writes about high-performance internet server software at Inktomi Corporation. After earning M.A. and Ph.C. degrees in Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, she worked on mathematics curriculum reform. Since 1990 she has written about energy resource management, parallel systems software, telephony, and networking.

Dr. Anshu Aggarwal was most recently the Director of Engineering at Inktomi Corporation. He led the protocol-processing engineering teams for Inktomi's web caching products, and he has been involved in the design of web technologies at Inktomi since 1997. Anshu holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, specializing in memory-consistent techniques for distributed multiprocessor machines. He also holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering. Anshu is the author of several technical papers and patents.

Sailu Reddy led the development of embedded performance-enhancing HTTP proxies at Inktomi Corporation. Sailu has been developing complex software systems for 12 years and has been deeply involved in web infrastructure research and development since 1995. He was a core engineer of Netscape's first web server and web proxy products and of several following generations. His technical experience includes HTTP applications, data compression techniques, database engines, and collaboration management. Sailu earned an M.S. in Information Systems from the University of Arizona and holds several patents in web technologies.

Table of Contents

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

Part II. HTTP Architecture
  - Chapter 5. Web Servers
  - Chapter 6. Proxies
  - Chapter 7. Caching
  - Chapter 8. Gateways, Tunnels, and Relays
  - Chapter 9. Web Robots
  - Chapter 10. HTTP-NG

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

Part IV. Entities, Encodings, and Internationalization
  - Chapter 15. Entities and Encodings
  - Chapter 16. Internationalized Characters and Languages
  - Chapter 17. Content Negotiation and Transcoding

Part V. Content Publishing and Distribution
  - Chapter 18. Web Hosting
  - Chapter 19. Publishing Systems
  - Chapter 20. Redirection and Load Balancing
  - Chapter 21. Logging and Usage Tracking

Part VI. 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