Monday, April 7, 2003		Book Review

Discussing technologies through case studies
Review by Vinod Kumar
Web Technologies; TCP/IP to Internet Application Architectures by Achyut S. Godbole and Atul Kahate. Pages 599. Price Rs 250.

THE Internet has emerged as a force to be reckoned with. It has captured the imagination of people around the world. One of the reasons for this is the immense popularity of World Wide Web (www). Globally accessible through the Internet, the Web has changed the world of information. Bits of information that might take months to be collected by using traditional communication mediums like phone, fax and mail can now be collected within a few hours of Internet searching. It won’t be wrong to say that the Internet is a mine of information that has crossed all geographical barriers.

The book under review is written by Achyut S. Godbole and Atul Khate. Both writers have several years of experience in Information Technology (IT) under their belt.

This book gives everything you need to know about Web technology starting from the Internet to concepts of Web technology. It is written in a simple language with example and diagrams. All chapters in this book end up with detailed questions and exercises so as to test the knowledge of the material covered in it. This book is targeted towards those who have got basic understanding of computers. It starts off with a simple introduction of networking protocols. From there, the chapters become more advanced and cover all aspects of Web technology, comprehensively.

The first few chapters discuss how networking works. These chapters discuss networking protocols, concept of networking, Internet working devices like repeaters, routers, bridges, and gateways in great depth. Chapter 7 to 11 move ahead and give complete overview of the commercial side of the Web. The possible Web architectures, dynamic Web pages, and their importance are explained. Various aspects of e-commerce have also been examined.

Session management is one of the most important issues in the Web. Most of us who are new to the Web world wonder what is session and where and how sessions are created for the users. One of the chapters in this book explains what session management is and why is it so important. Various techniques, which helps in session management, such as cookies, session variables hidden variable etc are discussed in detail.

Security issue is a major concern in electronic commerce. There are many dangers involved in e-commerce transactions. Whenever we make a payment on the Net, there is every possible chance that the credit card information can be misused. Security issues and payment processing mechanisms related to the Internet are covered in this book. The basics of cryptography, digital signatures, and organisational security issues with reference to firewalls are covered under these topics. The details of various payment mechanism and electronic money and credit card processing model are also given. The chapter on electronic data interchange (EDI) discusses how it works. The benefits and key middleware technologies like CORBA, RMI and DCOM are also included.

Detailed introduction on J2EE and .NET, including Web services has been written about. In the last chapter of this book, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is discussed in detail. In addition, this book contains five appendices. It contains case study of a Web commerce site using Microsoft’s ASP. One of the appendixes gives an introduction of Object Technology. Apart from the theory, simple case study to see how object technology differs from the conventional application development techniques and using Public Key infrastructure (PKI) for providing security to Web applications have been discussed.

After reading this book you will discover that all topics covered in this will provide a solid understanding of Web technology. Every IT student and professional can easily understand this book. In a nutshell, it contains various ingredients, which can be of great use to IT professional and students.