Reddit mentions of HTTP: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide (Definitive Guides)

I was an engineer at Groupon. I don't know how they treated their sales staff, but the engineers were treated pretty well. During the development of "Groupon 2.0" (when the major shift in form and function occurred), they catered in breakfast lunch and dinner for all of us. Once the project was over, they rented a bus and rented out this fancy restaurant.

The people there were very friendly, and many of them really knew their shit. People coming from companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. Probably the most impressive resume of anyone working there: Brian Totty, the SVP of Engineering wrote the book on HTTP, and was part of the team that invented the CDN. I learned a lot.

By the way, "Derrick" is actually CEO and Founder Andrew Mason.

I have this book and a bunch of others on various languages. There are good books around, the thing is though you aren't really going to sit down and just read them and when you're looking for a reference while programming google is 2 clicks away and better then a clumsy book.

Beyond the basics I learnt the majority of the html/css I know from viewing the source of web pages I liked. For the more obscure problems a general resource isn't really going to help you anyway, I generally found my answers by reading other people's posts asking the same questions.

tldr ~ google and a wary eye to be able to sift through the crap.

What you probably want to look at is HTTP. It should be language agnostic. I'm still learning about HTTP myself, but GET requests should get you sorted for now. I haven't found any good free tutorials online for HTTP, but this book is great.

Just got this myself a while back. 10/10 would recommend. http://www.amazon.com/HTTP-The-Definitive-Guide-Guides/dp/1565925092