HTTP Pocket Reference - Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Behind every web transaction lies the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) --- the language of web browsers and servers, of portals and search engines, of e-commerce and web services. Understanding HTTP is essential for practically all web-based programming, design, analysis, and administration.

While the basics of HTTP are elegantly simple, the protocol's advanced features are notoriously confusing, because they knit together complex technologies and terminology from many disciplines. This book clearly explains HTTP and these interrelated core technologies, in twenty-one logically organized chapters, backed up by hundreds of detailed illustrations and examples, and convenient reference appendices. HTTP: The Definitive Guide explains everything people need to use HTTP efficiently -- including the "black arts" and "tricks of the trade" -- in a concise and readable manner.

In addition to explaining the basic HTTP features, syntax and guidelines, this book clarifies related, but often misunderstood topics, such as: TCP connection management, web proxy and cache architectures, web robots and robots.txt files, Basic and Digest authentication, secure HTTP transactions, entity body processing, internationalized content, and traffic redirection.

Many technical professionals will benefit from this book. Internet architects and developers who need to design and develop software, IT professionals who need to understand Internet architectural components and interactions, multimedia designers who need to publish and host multimedia, performance engineers who need to optimize web performance, technical marketing professionals who need a clear picture of core web architectures and protocols, as well as untold numbers of students and hobbyists will all benefit from the knowledge packed in this volume.

There are many books that explain how to use the Web, but this is the one that explains how the Web works. Written by experts with years of design and implementation experience, this book is the definitive technical bible that describes the "why" and the "how" of HTTP and web core technologies. HTTP: The Definitive Guide is an essential reference that no technically-inclined member of the Internet community should be without.

If you need to create or use formal descriptions of XML vocabularies, the W3C's XML Schema offers a powerful set of tools for defining acceptable document structures and content. An alternative to DTDs as the way to describe and validate data in an XML environment, XML Schema enables developers to create precise descriptions with a richer set of datatypes?such as booleans, numbers, currencies, dates and times?that are essential for today?s applications.

Schemas are powerful, but that power comes with substantial complexity. This concise book explains the ins and outs of XML Schema, including design choices, best practices, and limitations. Particularly valuable are discussions of how the type structures fit with existing database and object-oriented program contexts. With XML Schema, you can define acceptable content models and annotate those models with additional type information, making them more readily bound to programs and objects. Schemas combine the easy interchange of text-based XML with the more stringent requirements of data exchange, and make it easier to validate documents based on namespaces.

You?ll find plenty of examples in this book that demonstrate the details necessary for precise vocabulary definitions. Topics include:

• Foundations of XML Schema syntax
• Flat, "russian-doll", and other schema approaches
• Working with simple and complex types in a variety of contexts
• The built-in datatypes provided by XML Schema
• Using facets to extend datatypes, including regular expression-based patterns
• Using keys and uniqueness rules to limit how and where information may appear
• Creating extensible schemas and managing extensibility
• Documenting schemas and extending XML Schema capabilities through annotations

In addition to the explanatory content, XML Schemaprovides a complete reference to all parts of both the XML Schema Structures and XML Schema Datatypes specifications, as well as a glossary. Appendices explore the relationships between XML Schema and other tools for describing document structures, including DTDs, RELAX NG, and Schematron, as well as work in progress at the W3C to more tightly integrate XML Schema with existing specifications.

No matter how you intend to use XML Schema - for data structures or document structures, for standalone documents or part of SOAP transactions, for documentation, validation, or data binding ? all the foundations you need are outlined in XML Schema.

Delve inside Windows architecture and internals—and see how core components work behind the scenes. Led by three renowned internals experts, this classic guide is fully updated for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2—and now presents its coverage in two volumes.

As always, you get critical insider perspectives on how Windows operates. And through hands-on experiments, you’ll experience its internal behavior firsthand—knowledge you can apply to improve application design, debugging, system performance, and support.

In Part 2, you’ll examine:

• Core subsystems for I/O, storage, memory management, cache manager, and file systems
• Startup and shutdown processes
• Crash-dump analysis, including troubleshooting tools and techniques