Security for Web Developers

Part II. Applying Successful Coding Practices

In this part of the book, you begin looking at the techniques for coding secure applications. Each of the chapters that follow discusses a particular part of a typical web-based application. Chapter 4 begins with the user interface, which is potentially the most important part because security begins and ends with user cooperation. If the interface is flawed, the user simply won’t cooperate (at least, not nearly as well) and your security solution will contain flaws. Chapter 5 goes hand in hand with Chapter 4. An application that is unreliable is frustrating for a user to interact with and tends to create still more security issues both directly and indirectly.

Modern applications don’t exist in a vacuum. If a developer were to build every application from scratch, everyone would suffer. The use of libraries (Chapter 6), APIs (Chapter 7), and microservices (Chapter 8) makes the process of building an application much faster and easier. In addition, because the code provided by these third-party sources receives so much scrutiny, it tends to be safer than the standalone code you could build yourself and it usually receives updates faster than your organization could provide them for custom code.