When you launch an application on the web, every hacker in the world has access to it. Are you sure your web apps can stand up to the most sophisticated attacks? Grokking Web Application Security teaches you how to build web apps that are ready for and resilient to any attack. It's laser-focused on what the working programmer needs to know about web security, and is fully illustrated with concrete examples and essential advice from author Malcolm McDonald's extensive career. You'll learn what motivates hackers to hack a site, discover the latest tools for identifying security issues, and set up a development lifecycle that catches security issues early. Read it cover to cover for a comprehensive overview of web security, and dip in as a reference whenever you need to tackle a specific vulnerability. Web application security is a curious subject area, in that every programmer (even fresh out of boot camp or with a recent computer science degree in hand) will have a fair knowledge of it, but we tend to feel (quite correctly) that we should know a little bit more. Doing your own research on the web can feel like walking into a disorganized library and picking up random texts, hoping to gain some good insights. Furthermore, nobody loves going to their boss and admitting that they have gaps in their knowledge, so we tend to be a little insecure about what we might not know. Launching a web application on the internet is a daunting task. The steps you take along the road to deploying a web app can be onerous: designing and coding your web pages, adding interactivity using JavaScript, implementing the backend services and connecting them to a data store, choosing a hosting platform, and registering a domain name. The result is worthwhile, of course: your website will be available to billions of users immediately, thanks to the magic of the internet.