Bartosz Sypytkowski's Reviews > High Performance Browser Networking

This is one of the best books about networks dedicated for pragmatic software developers. If you want to read only two books on that subject, I'd recommend it together with A. Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks".

It covers in depth specifics of most common upper parts of the OSI stack - TCP, TLS, UDP, HTTP 1.1 and 2.0, WebSockets, WebRTC and their extensions - as well as providing some details about cellular networks, which is increasingly common use case in modern day web.

What's important, it's not a dry knowledge presented only for its own sake. There's a ton of practical tips on how awareness of network stack and its capabilities can be used to optimize everyday web services, cut down requests latency, bandwidth usage and make your web application respect battery lifetime of mobile devices.

The only small thing is that reading this book nowadays is not closing all necessary corners, eg. the edition I was reading was describing LTE and HTTP 2.0 as novel approaches, therefore even more recent network-related innovations are simply not there. However it's not the fault of the book itself, and it doesn't diminish the usefulness and applicability of its content.