All of us use HTTP via our browsers on a daily basis, but likely it's rare that we interact with it on a more personal nature. What our browsers hide, the HTTP Pocket Reference reveals to those looking for a little bit more depth to their relationship with this well-used protocol.

The book begins with a general introduction to HTTP transactions, and then describes the various client request methods such as GET, POST, and friends. The author then moves to the server and describes the possible server response codes that might result from a client request (ever wonder what a 408 response means?).

Short descriptions of all the HTTP headers, both general, and client and server specific are then covered followed by a handy table describing which headers are supported by each version of HTTP. The book also includes a table of URL encoding sequences as well as several pages of common media types. To round out the coverage cookies, connection persistence, authorization, content retrieval, and client caching are discussed briefly. Helful examples demonstrating the use of most of the topics are found throughout the book.

If you're looking for something to help you out when you want to debug server problems by talking to your server via telnet on port 80, or if you're just curious about what's going on behind the scenes of your browser then this book will be very helpful. It provides coverage that will help you become familiar enough with the protocol without having to wade through the depth of the related RFCs.

Overall rating: 9/10