The authors approach HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the other protocols covered from an engineering perspective, which is to say that they outline the problems the protocols are meant to solve before going into detail about what the protocols do. They also explain the evolution of protocols over time, and call attention to the shortcomings of protocols and their likely evolutionary paths. Nearly all of the explanatory material takes the form of bright, carefully considered text that's supplemented by message listings ("The server could reply with...") and a handful of conceptual diagrams. Later chapters transcend the protocols themselves to focus on questions of reliability, traffic measurement, and efficient caching. --David Wall

Topics covered: The protocols that underpin transactions on the Internet and other networks that employ Internet communications standards. Detailed coverage goes to the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) versions 1.0 and 1.1, the Internet Protocol addressing scheme, and the Transmission Control Protocol specification. Design of Web servers, cache servers, and proxy servers gets much attention, as do site workload and traffic metrics.

This book with help you understand the entire path between browser and web server and how Internet latency and intermediaries like Proxy servers add to transaction delay. This is the only source that I've seen that a) Defines HTTP 1.1 and b) describes the relationship between HTTP and the TCP/IP protocol stack, making recommendations on how to tune the stack to reduce the effect of latency.

You'll learn that many of TCP's flow control mechanisms were designed for FTP, Telnet and Rlogin and some default settings are not optimized, or even appropriate for HTTP.