You think you may know enough HTTP, it's just a simple application level protocol eh? Hold your thought till you read this book. I borrowed this book from a library merely for doing some research on HTTP connection management and secure authentication. However, the more I read, the more I'm amazed there're lots of practical and interesting topics with so rich but not boring details. The book uses quite numbers of pictures to depict different handshaking protocols and complicated concepts, very easy to follow and understand. It is certainly not the HTTP specification reprint. It tells you what, why, where, and how. It is as the name suggested --- The Definitive Guide.

This book gives you very resourceful details on how HTTP works with a wild range of topics like Caching, Proxies, Gateway, Tunneling, Web Robots, Connection Management, Cookies, Various Authentication, Security, i18n, Hosting, and even Load Balancing! For example, it addresses how web crawlers work, really the inside out information, how a web crawler can back track their visited paths and what other alternatives to prevent & resolve loops & dups.

HTTP is becoming the 'operating system' for distributed applications in Internet. No doubt in my mind, from beginners, advanced users, even to researchers, will surely be benefitted from this excellent book. The authors really did a superb job. Five Stars!

Many web developers out there happily ignore many important things about HTTP; well, while a deep knowledge of HTTP isn't mandatory to build web-based applications, a decent understanding can be quite handy. The authors assembled and organized an amazing amount of information, really delivering a definitive, but still quite readable guide.

As its name states, this book is a defintive guide. It provides in depth coverage of all important HTTP information in use today, ranging from the basic communications protocol, to cache control, proxies, and security mechanisms. It's extremely well written in clear, easy to understand terms.
The organization of the book is one reason I gave it only 4 stars instead of 5. Material on proxies, and especially cache control, was spread through the book, rather than being located in any one area. While the basics of these are important to understanding some of the considerations in writing an HTTP application, a different organizational structure may have suited the material better.
This book is still a great teaching and reference book for learning HTTP, but if you are not planning on running your own HTTP server, especially a proxy or caching server, a lot of this book is overkill. I'm sure I'll be referring to it in the future for various other kinds of HTTP information.

I had never thought of HTTP in such a broad scale before I read "HTTP::The Definitive Guide". Apparently, Web sites and Web browsers are not the only things that should come to mind when one thinks of HTTP. Flexibility of the protocol made it home for so many breakthroughs of the Internet. It's amazing that there were no comprehensive textbooks covering the topic until today.

Organizing such enormous data in a 500-line book is a challenge already. But authors managed to go even beyond. The result was a well organized, comprehensive and amazingly easy to follow book.

The book is organized into 6 large sections. Each section is split into Chapters. Wherever appropriate, authors use figures and diagrams to illustrate the point.

The first section, called "Web's Foundation" covers most of the things an average web developer may already have known. It starts off with a chapter on HTTP Overview, and covers such topics as URLs, HTTP Messages - requests and responses, connections - parallel, persistent and pipeline. Some of the highlights are HTTP versions and their differences, URL conversion algorithms and status codes.

The second section, called "HTTP Architecture", is probably the most informative section with lots of gory details. It discusses existing technologies that make things happen - players of the Web. Starts with Web Servers that actually serve the original content. Takes you step by step what exactly happens once the Server accepts the request from your browser and displays you the page. Other technologies, such as Proxies, Caching, Gateways, Tunnels and Relays are very well covered. They even talk about Web Robots (a.k.a. Crawlers) and allocate over 30 exciting pages on these both annoying and incredibly useful "creatures". The section is finished with a brief overview of HTTP-NG, also called "Next Generation HTTP".

"Identification, Authorization, and Security" is the next section, that talks about just that. Detailed coverage on Cookies, Basic and Digestion Authentication available. Walks you through the architecture of HTTPS, a.k.a SSL/TLC and algorithms used.

Fourth section is on Encoding, Internationalization and Content Negotiation.

Fifth section is on Content Publishing and Distribution. Types of web hosting and Publishing systems - all covered. Also allocated good deal of time on explaining Redirections and Load Balancing - very useful topic. Wraps up the discussion with a chapter on Logging and Usage tracking.

Last, over 100 pages of the book are all useful Appendixes.

If you really want to understand how the Web really works (I mean, really), this is a "must have" book.

This is a really nice, technical reference of HTTP; the technology that makes the web work. I am a software engineer interested in web services, and this book has rescued me from a pile of confusing technical specifications. I've been waiting for a book like this, and it's no surprise O'Reilly came out with it. The book is technically deep, but it's well written and thoughtfully organized. It's not "HTTP" for dummies (it has 700 pages of meat), but the friendly writing made it easy even for my colleagues who knew nothing about HTTP. There are also hundreds of great illustrations that make technical interactions clear.

The book seems useful for anyone that wants to understand how the internet works; but it's deep enough for professional developers and academic types. The authors clearly have clearly spent a lot of work on the book, to make it thorough and readable. The book is very good, but I wish it had more detail about web services and maybe wireless web communications. Those might be slightly off-topic, but I think they'd go great in this book.

I agree with most of the other reviews of this book (but the Anton Skederis review below seems to be reviewing the "HTTP pocket reference" which is an entirely different book). All said, if you are a technical or marketing professional involved with internet technology, or a computer science student, this book may be a good addition to your library. I'd give it a 4.7 out of 5. - T.E.B.

HTTP: the Definitive Guide is a comprehensive view of the plumbing of the web. There are enough gory details to satisfy the hungriest of developers (it's becoming a standard reference where I work), but where the book really shines is in how it presents a coherent overview of all the elements of modern web infrastructure and how they fit together. The book is very well written in that each chapter is independently accessible on an as-needed basis, yet hangs together as a coherent whole as well. For example, I needed to get a quick (re)-education on redirection; I was able to get what I needed from that chapter quickly and easily, with the pros and cons of various approaches laid out in an easy to grasp manner. The material on caching is also particularly meaty (unsurprising given the author's backgrounds). Managers, executives and IT professionals who need to become fully "buzzword compliant" will also find this book surprisingly accessible and informative.

I bought this book to gain some deeper insight into HTTP. I am employed as a web developer, granting me knowledge of all layers above HTTP. I was once employed as a low-level engineer, granting me knowledge of networks and protocols (TCP/IP). I was still missing knowledge of HTTP though. This tiny pocket reference is a wealth of information. Well-organized and seemingly very complete, with examples at just the right times in just the right amount. While reading this I decided to write a small personal webserver, just to get my feet wet and learn quicker. This little reference was all I needed to put my own HTTP server up (and I tossed in a complete CMS, just for the heck of it). It's no tutorial, but as a reference it is great and lives up to it's intended goals completely!

If you are looking for a comprehensive book with thorough coverage of HTTP, take a break now. You have found one. Congratulations!
This well-structured guide provides a superior analysis of both HTTP Protocol and its method of defining all those rules that our Webs obey.
Using the very concept of Web technologies which HyperText Transfer Protocol, (HTTP), supports, David Gourley and his colleagues explained all those behind-the-scene principles that make this protocol the universal wonder that it is today.
There is hardly any essential HTTP information that is not in this book. Even the very latest technologies, as well as their subsequent Web applications are included.
"HTTP: The Definitive Guide" is one reliable companion, that will make life easy for Web Programmers.

Collaboratively written by HTTP experts David Gourley and Brian Totty (with the additional assistance of Marjorie Sayer, Sailu Reddy, and Anshu Aggarwal), HTTP: The Definitive Guide is a thorough and "reader friendly" introductory presentation of HTTP protocol, how it works, and how it is used to create webpages and to develop web-based applications. A wealth of development and application tips, tricks, techniques, as well as cogent strategies for optimizing proxies and caches, creating robots and web crawlers, crafting secure HTTP applications, and much, much more are featured in this highly recommended and truly extensive guide which packed with numerous and illustrative examples ideal for aspiring web programmers, administrators, and application developers.

This book is more than just an HTTP reference. In fact the name of the book may even be a bit misleading. While it does an excellent job of describing the "what", "why", and "how" of HTTP, it goes a great deal further by describing how the various technologies that interact with HTTP work. And since HTTP is the very foundation of the Web, this book ends up being a great guide to the guts of all of WWW.

If you ever had a question about how a certain piece of Internet technology works, there is a good chance you will find it described in this book. From various types of Internet gateways, servers, and proxies, to security, content publishing & distribution, and HTTP related performance issues.

The topics are dealt in an insightful, practical way - full of useful examples, and "tricks of the trade". The writing style is very engaging, and accessible even to non-technical readers. Authors' knowledge and passion for the subject matter shows through. I have had the good fortune of working with the authors, and I can't think of a more qualified bunch of people to write this book.

Size of the book appears a bit daunting first, but you don't need to read it cover to cover. Just pick your topic of interest, or keep the book as a reference. I have been closely involved with developing HTTP related high performance Internet servers/gateways/proxies for six years, and I haven't seen a better book on the topic.

There aren't many authors that understand the details and reasoning of http. This book is refreshing in both its depth and its humor. A remarkable and much needed effort!