Wilde's WWW: Technical Foundations of the World Wide Web

This book is an excellent compendium of most of the core web technologies. An added bonus is the author used LaTeX so its easy to read and well formatted. Unfortunately this technology is moving so quickly that this book is already outdated. It is easier to track these technologies through online documents.

When there are numerous technologies behind the internet or part of internet, one needs to have a macro view of related technoliges to do any sensible thing. If you are looking for such a macro view / total perspective of internet, this is the book to refer to. Even though one cannot expect to get details of numerous techologise in one single book, this book managed to cover the basics of most relevant technologies.

At first, a warning: reading through this book sometimes is not very entertaining, as the author tried to squeeze in as much information as possible. However, as a reference, it is almost invaluable, containing a huge glossary and a nice index. I especially liked the author's attempt to present the Web's many technologies in an interconnected way, providing readers with the opportunity to understand many dependencies between technologies. I heavily recommend this book to all people who are looking for a (almost) complete and extensive reference of Web technologies.