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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.

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.

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!