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HTTP: The Definitive Guide Copyright © 2002 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O'Reilly & Associates books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http:// ). For more information contact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected] . Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O'Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. The association between the image of a thirteen-lined ground squirrel and the topic of HTTP is a trademark of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and the authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. Preface The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol programs use to communicate over the World Wide Web. There are many applications of HTTP, but HTTP is most famous for two-way conversation between web browsers and web servers. HTTP began as a simple protocol, so you might think there really isn't that much to say about it. And yet here you stand, with a two-pound book in your hands. If you're wondering how we could have written 650 pages on HTTP, take a look at the Table of Contents. This book isn't just an HTTP header reference manual; it's a veritable bible of web architecture. In this book, we try to tease apart HTTP's interrelated and often misunderstood rules, and we offer you a series of topic-based chapters that explain all the aspects of HTTP. Throughout the book, we are careful to explain the "why" of HTTP, not just the "how." And to save you time chasing references, we explain many of the critical non-HTTP technologies that are required to make HTTP applications work. You can find the alphabetical header reference (which forms the basis of most conventional HTTP texts) in a conveniently organized appendix. We hope this conceptual design makes it easy for you to work with HTTP. This book is written for anyone who wants to understand HTTP and the underlying architecture of the Web. Software and hardware engineers can use this book as a coherent reference for HTTP and related web technologies. Systems architects and network administrators can use this book to better understand how to design, deploy, and manage complicated web architectures. Performance engineers and analysts can benefit from the sections on caching and performance optimization. Marketing and consulting professionals will be able to use the conceptual orientation to better understand the landscape of web technologies.

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