Web Security for Developers: Real Threats, Practical Defense
Equip yourself with modern, actionable strategies to safeguard web applications from real-world attacks.
Whether you're building a website from scratch or contributing to a large-scale web application, understanding how to defend your code against real-world attacks is no longer optional, it's essential. Web Security for Developers by Malcolm McDonald is a hands-on guide that demystifies the most common vulnerabilities and walks you through practical defenses, step-by-step.
This book isn’t about theory, it’s about threats developers face every day, explained in a language they understand. McDonald pulls from real-life examples and walks readers through attacks like XSS, SQL injection, CSRF, and clickjacking, showing not just how they work, but why they’re dangerous, and how to write code that stops them cold.
Ideal for web developers at all levels, the book skips the abstract academic approach and gets straight to actionable advice. Whether you’re working with HTML, JavaScript, or server-side languages, you’ll learn how to think like an attacker so you can design defenses that actually work.
Web application security breaches continue to dominate headlines. From data leaks to site takeovers, this book arms developers with the knowledge to stop being the weak link. McDonald makes clear that writing secure code isn’t just the security team’s job, it’s yours too.
By the end, you’ll not only understand how web attacks work, but how to prevent them proactively using defensive programming techniques, smart architecture choices, and tools you likely already use.
What you will learn
Understand how common vulnerabilities like XSS, SQLi, CSRF, and clickjacking really work
Learn how attackers exploit session management, cookies, and browser behaviors
Use secure development patterns and design principles to prevent exploits
Implement input validation, output encoding, and other key defense strategies
Spot subtle security issues in your own code before attackers do
Build an intuition for how hackers approach your application and how to frustrate them
Who this book is for
This book is for front-end and back-end developers, site builders, DevOps engineers, and anyone else responsible for building or maintaining a website or web app. No prior security expertise is required, just a working knowledge of web development is enough. If you’ve ever wondered, “Could someone hack this?” then this book will help you answer that question with confidence.
Table of Contents
What Is Web Security?
The Browser Security Model
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
SQL Injection (SQLi)
Clickjacking
Session Security
TLS and HTTPS
Content Security Policy (CSP)
Building Secure Applications
Detecting and Preventing Vulnerabilities
Security Tools and Libraries
Final Thoughts and Next Steps