FYI: Read "High-Performance Browser Networking"

[Jens Alfke]

I spent some time over the holidays reading Ilya Grigorik's High-Performance Browser Networking (O’Reilly) which can be read free online. It’s a really, really, really good book, and I highly recommend it to all of you.

The first three parts are valuable for anyone writing networked code, not just web-apps:

I. Networking 101 — Overview of IP networking from packets up through SSL, including the important details of the TCP protocol.

II. Performance of Wireless Networks — discusses how WiFi and the many cellular protocols work. I learned a lot from this, especially the alphabet soup of the cellular world (3GPP, HSDPA, LTE…) It focuses a lot on latency and power consumption.

III. HTTP — All about how HTTP works. I knew most of this, but the coverage of HTTP 2.0 was all new to me and very interesting.

The rest of the book is more browser-focused, so it wasn’t as useful for me personally; but the stuff above is easily worth the cost of the book, and a total no-brainer to read for free.

—Jens

[Paul Capestany]

Nice. Added it to my reading queue. 

Thanks for the tip!