front matter
I became interested in HTTP/2 at an early stage. The emergence of a new technology that promised almost free performance gains while potentially removing the need for some of the messy workarounds web developers had to use was definitely intriguing. The reality was a little more complicated, however, and after spending some time figuring out how to deploy it on my Apache server and then struggling to explain the impact on performance that I was seeing, I got frustrated with the lack of documentation. I wrote a couple of blog posts on how to set it up, and those posts proved to be popular. At the same time, I started getting involved with some of the HTTP/2 projects on GitHub, as well as lurking around the topic on Stack Overflow and helping out those who had similar issues to my own. When Manning came calling, looking for someone to write a book about HTTP/2, I jumped at the chance. I hadn’t been involved in its genesis, but I felt that I could speak to the many struggling web developers out there like me who had heard about this technology but lacked the knowledge to get it deployed.