Common misunderstandings about HTTP
When developing web applications and HTTP APIs, it can pay to be aware of a few details that many developers miss. Let’s look at a few of the key areas where knowing a bit extra can really pay off in terms of the reliability of the applications you create. The curl skills we cover in this chapter will also give you the ability to start troubleshooting something as vague as “the website is down” from the command line.
HTTP statuses
In the following sections, we will cover some of the common HTTP statuses you’ll encounter. We’ll also consider some important information and myths about these statuses that you should keep in mind.
Don’t just check for 200 OK
A common way to check for errors is only checking for a 200 or the whole 2xx range of status codes to know whether a request was a success. There are some caveats to be aware of when doing this, though.
The 200 range (2xx, as in, every...
