This book taps into the author's wide experience as an architect and programmer to explore Tomcat from the ground up. Each major component of Tomcat is covered in careful detail, both from a conceptual and an implementation perspective. Written with detailed explanations and lots of screenshots, the book covers its topics in a concise, practical, and understandable manner. This book is intended for web developers who want to take their programming skills to the next level, and for server administrators who want to get a better understanding of the container software they manage. This book will give you an expert's understanding of every component that contributes to the overall request processing capabilities of Tomcat. In addition, the concepts you learn will be general enough to be carried over to other servlet containers. This book is also a good starting point for developers who want to understand how high availability and high performance software, such as Tomcat, are designed. If you wish to contribute to the Tomcat project, then this is an ideal book for you. Prior knowledge of the Java programming language, and web development on the Java platform is assumed.