Dina Bogdan's Reviews > High Performance Browser Networking

This book is very good and I think that it should a must-read for every developer of web-applications, but also for developers of mobile applications. It starts with the basics like Networking 101 where the most used transport protocols (IP, TCP, UDP) are discussed. Be aware that this is not a protocols book, so don't look for very in-depth details for the protocols' part.

After that talks about wireless networks, WiFi standards, and mobile networks as well. This part was hard for me because I don't have an electrical engineering background. This is the primary reason why I rate the book with 4/5 stars, rather than 5/5.

Then it goes up in the ISO OSI stack talking about high-level protocols such as HTTP1.x, HTTP2, SSL/TLS, and how to optimize an application that leverages these protocols.

In the last chapter, there are discussed protocols such as XHR, SSE, WebSocket, and WebRTC. I like that here in the last chapter the author tries to not take part in any protocol, exposing the consequences of using each of them. I think that if you will be in face of choosing a protocol for your application, then you can easily use this book as a starting point for making the decision.