How prepared are you when it comes to building network-enabled applications? This book provides what every web developer should know about the network - from fundamental limitations that affect performance to major innovations for building even more powerful browser apps. By understanding what the browser can and cannot do, you'll be able to make better design decisions and deliver faster web applications to your users. Author Ilya Grigorik - a developer advocate and web performance engineer at Google - starts with the building blocks of TCP and UDP, and then dives into newer technologies such as HTTP 2.0, WebSockets, and WebRTC. This book explains the benefits of these technologies and helps you determine which ones to use for your next application. Learn how TCP affects the performance of HTTP Understand why mobile networks are slower than wired networks Use best practices to address performance bottlenecks in HTTP Discover how HTTP 2.0 (based on SPDY) will improve networking Learn how to use Server Sent Events (SSE) for push updates, and WebSockets for XMPP chat Explore WebRTC for browser-to-browser applications such as P2P video chat Examine the architecture of a simple app that uses HTTP 2.0, SSE, WebSockets, and WebRTC