A bird´s eye view of Web caching research [book review]

The article is a review of the book: Web Caching and Its Applications, written by S.V. Nagaraj and published by Springer, 2004. Web caching technology improves client download times and reduces network traffic by caching frequently accessed copies of Web objects close to the clients. The primary research issues in Web caching are where to cache copies of objects (cache placement), how to keep the cached copies consistent (cache consistency), and how to redirect clients to the optimal cache server (client redirection). Web caching systems´ design space is huge, and building a good caching system involves several issues. Over the past decade, researchers have carried out a tremendous amount of work in addressing these issues. In Web Caching and Its Applications, S.V. Nagaraj aims to provide a bird´s eye view of this research. He has exhaustively surveyed the literature and summarized the results of several research publications. The author concludes that the book can serve as a reference tool for researchers and for graduate students working on Web systems. However, its approach isn´t suitable for Web administrators or students who are new to the field.