HTTP: The Definitive Guide

HTTP: The Definitive Guide is the volume in O'Reilly's classic Definitive Guide series that covers HTTP and the core technologies of the Web. The Chinese edition was brought out in the Turing Programming Series, translated by Chen Juan and Zhao Zhenping. The book takes HTTP as its center, yet its aim goes beyond the protocol itself: it seeks to explain how the Web actually works and how that knowledge applies to Web programming, operations, and management. The content unfolds in six parts. Part One lays the foundation, starting with an overview of HTTP and explaining clients and servers, resources and URI/URL/URN, transactions and status codes, messages and connections, and clarifying URL syntax and encoding rules; it then goes deeper into the structure and syntax of HTTP messages, and into connection management topics such as TCP/IP, parallel connections, and persistent connections. Part Two covers HTTP architectural components: Web servers, proxies, caches, gateways, tunnels and relays, Web robots, and also introduces HTTP-NG, still under exploration at the time. Part Three focuses on identification, authentication, and security, including client identification and cookies, Basic authentication, Digest authentication, and secure HTTP. Part Four deals with entities and encoding, internationalization, content negotiation, and transcoding. Part Five concerns content publishing and distribution: Web hosting, publishing systems, redirection and load balancing, and logging and usage tracking. Part Six consists of appendices with quick-reference material such as URI schemes, status codes, a header reference, MIME types, Base-64 encoding, Digest authentication, language tags, and the MIME charset registry. With numerous diagrams and examples, the book explains what actually happens behind each request, and it explains why things are designed as they are rather than merely listing specifications, so it serves both as a systematic read and as a reference to consult as needed. One caveat: the protocol details discussed reflect the standards at the time of writing and do not include later developments such as HTTP/2 and HTTP/3.