This guide to turbo-charging the Web is primarily geared toward system administrators; however, Web developers can also learn much about the proper--and improper--use of caching their pages. The book begins with excellent chapters on the big picture of how Web caching works, including the various types of caches, hit measurements, validation, and cache refreshing. Before turning to this guide's core focus--designing and implementing caching--the author spends a chapter to explore the political issues surrounding the technology, such as privacy, content distribution, and copyrights.

Both client and server configurations are considered, and the benefits of Netscape and Microsoft implementations are explored. The journey through the efficient travels of Web requests is fascinating as you learn about proxies, intercache protocols, cache hierarchies, and benchmarking methodologies for measuring the efficiency of your solutions. Dishing up requests elegantly is not a trivial task on today's Web, but this no-nonsense book is a great help toward that goal. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered:

• Web transport protocols
• HTTP and proxy requests
• Cache replacement and refreshing
• Political concerns
• Client configuration
• Interception proxying
• Server configuration
• Cache hierarchies
• Intercache protocols
• Cache clustering
• Monitoring/benchmarking
• Cache trace analysis