The Lean Plan

This is a software book, so it contains a lot of code, most of which has been specially written (or specially adapted) for the book. The software isn't a museum piece, to be studied in a glass case, but rather a construction kit, to promote understanding through experimentation. The text is interspersed with source code fragments that illustrate the points being discussed and provide working examples of theoretical concepts. All the source code in the book, and complete project configurations for various compilers, are on the enclosed CD-ROM.

When I started writing this book, I intended to concentrate on the protocol aspects of embedded Web servers, but I came to realize that the techniques of providing dynamic content (on-the-fly Web page generation) and client/server data transfers were equally important, yet relatively unexplored. Here are some reasons for studying this book.

TCP/IP. You want to understand the inner workings of TCP/IP and need some tools and utilities to experiment with.

Dynamic Web Content. You have an embedded TCP/IP stack and need to insert dynamic data into the Web pages.

Miniaturization. You are interested in incorporating a miniature Web server in your system but need to understand what resources are required and what compromises will have to be made.

Prototyping. You want a prebuilt Web server that you can customize to evaluate the concept in a proposed application.

Data transfer. You need to transfer data across a network using standard protocols.

Client/server programming.