This is my review of the book: HTTP The Definitive Guide

Reviewer:Blake Mitchell

President & CEO Sunray International Computer Programming Company

I guess I should have know this book was in trouble as soon as I read the title. Anybody with the arrogance to call anything THE and/or DEFINITIVE, in this day and age is way too arrogant to be able to write a good book. I also should have gotten a clue by the fact that the picture on the cover was a squirrel. Squirrelly describes this book well.

In the first chapter, I got a good first impression. It was VERY superficial and contained many real world examples one could test on the internet. However, it turned out that the entire book was just as superficial on every topic it discussed.

Furthermore, after about the middle of the second chapter, all examples ceased. The ones near the front of the chapter didn't work anyway, so I thought it might be a good thing. There was very little of anything explained thoroughly enough to begin to understand it, even by a data processing professional with 24 years experience in the industry. After having read the whole book, I feel I know almost nothing more than I did when I first started.

The epilogue of the book is also telling as the first sentence tries to apologize for the way the book is written and the rest is spent in a detailed description of the squirrel on the cover What a complete waste of an effort. If I had paid for this book, I would be demanding my money back. My advice to the authors is to scrap the whole thing and start over. It is an extremely poor tutorial, which is what I was wanting, and an unthinkable reference.

I would advise people, in the future, to give a wide berth to anything written by David Gourley and/or Brian Totty. I have every faith they know their material well, but they don't know how to write about it. Not even 600 pages was long enough to provide more than an incredibly superficial skim of this involved topic.