Understanding HTTP/2

If you are reading this book, I’m going to assume that you have familiarity with HTTP/1.1 or that at least you have a sense of how to make traditional HTTP API calls over the network. I guess so because most of the APIs that we interact with, as developers, have concepts that were brought about by this protocol. I’m talking about concepts such as headers, which can provide metadata for a call; the body, which contains the main data; and actions such as GET, POST, UPDATE, and so on, which define what you intend to do with the data in the body.

HTTP/2 still has all of these concepts but improves efficiency, security, and usability in a few ways. The first advantage of HTTP/2 over plain old HTTP/1.1 is the compression down to binary. Before HTTP/2, everything sent over the network was pure text and it was up to the user to compress it or not. With version 2, every part of the HTTP semantic is translated down to binary, thus making it faster for computers...