Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices
This book provides and in-depth examination of the core concepts and general principles of web application development, using examples from specific technologies. This conceptual knowledge is critical when designing and debugging complex systems, and makes it easier to learn the new application programming interfaces (APIs) that arise in the rapidly changing Internet environment Split into three sections: · HTTP protocol as a foundation for web applicatio
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(out of 11 reviews)
Price: $ 45.68
Review by Mike Tarrani for Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices
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This book is an ideal text for providing intermediate-level web developers with a solid grounding in architectural principles and more advanced techniques. Before going into why I like this book I do want to offer one caveat – the authors’ approach is towards the Model-View-Controller paradigm, and is based on Java Standard Tag Library, Jarkata struts and Apache. These are solid elements, but if you are working in a different environment you will not appreciate this book as much.The historical material in this book is not fluff if you approach it with the intent to gain a fuller understanding of the major components of the Internet and web. This material is rich with details about why the core web technologies developed and evolved, including design choices the pioneers made in the face of constraints. In a subtle way this part of the book is a primer on design and architecture.What makes this book so valuable is the non-trivial application that brings this book alive. This is a refreshing change from other books that use thinly contrived snippets of code or trivial applications. The code for this application can be downloaded from the book’s supporting web site, which also contains errata (thus far there are only two entries), and articles that are valuable resources with or without this book.Overall this is one of the better books on web application design and development, and one that dives into code and technical details.
Review by Brian Mendez for Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices
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I have to disagree with the reviewer who disparaged this book’s emphasis on history. The background on TCP/IP protocols explained how HTTP came to be and why servers and browsers work the way they do. Discussion of how web development platforms evolved provided insight into the problems newer approaches tried to solve and the problems some of them created. The authors may have gone overboard spouting the merits of “separating content from presentation” and touting the praises of MVC approaches, but their point is a valid one you can really relate to if you’ve worked with page-centric platforms like ASP and JSP. The historical review of different approaches explained the authors’ reasons for ultimately choosing an MVC approach with Struts and JSTL, and offered insights into how development platforms may evolve in the future. This is a book that starts with basics and builds on them, covering protocols, markup languages, and development platforms. The history helps drive the points home. Personally, I learned a lot from this book. I agree that they could have provided a CD-ROM, but it turns out their website (webappbuilders.com) is pretty good and has other good info aside from the app’s source code, including some articles from the authors.
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I am not an expert developer but I have a fair amount of experience building financial applications in Java and C++. I spent quite some time looking for a book that would get me started with Web technologies. It is not easy. Yes, there are many books that describe one or another technology but I wanted to find one that puts these technologies in prospective. I was very pleased when I found this book. I can always dig deeper in one direction when I need to but this book helps me to understand how to get started and where to concentrate my efforts. I like it, I think it is very useful.
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I’m really impressed by the diverse coverage in this book, from e-mail protocols, HTTP transactions, server and browser architecture, XML and XSLT, to best practices for web application development. I’ve seen too many hodgepodge books on web application development that try to cover a broad range of topics that are slapped together haphazardly. This book has a well-defined learning path and a consistent style throughout, doing justice to each topic covered and tying all the information together cohesively. They say it’s not supposed to be a tutorial on Struts, but the chapter for the book’s sample application is better than many dedicated Struts tutorials. It explains clearly why MVC approaches are better than code-focused platforms like ASP, .NET, PHP, and JSP Model 1 — because those approaches don’t divide component responsibilities appropriately. The chapters on browser and server architecture explain the processing flow of HTTP requests and responses better than any other book I’ve seen, and the figures are quite helpful.
Review by Daniel Polfer for Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices
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I’ve been writing Windows-based mutlimedia applications since Windows 95 was released. I’ve been looking for a good book to help the crossover to web application development, and I found that this was just the ticket. Explanations were solid and presented in a way that made experimentation easy (both from the browser and server side). Quite simply, this book served as a great jumping off point for deeper exploration into session management, security, web services (both SOAP and Rest), etc. Definitely a great introduction for folks with a software engineering background.