Hey Aparsons, thanks for your feedback. As mentioned in the post, the Handbook is not finished and we'll continue to evolve, adding more chapters, meat to the current chapters, and we have other ideas like exercises.
It's good that you are interested in Scaling WebSockets, because that is the chapter I am writing now! I hope to get it live in a couple of weeks, once it is I can send you the new version.
As with REST APIs, you'd want to be able to authenticate to a websocket-based API using either basic auth, or a bearer token-based auth scheme. Unfortunately, the browser websocket API doesn't allow you to specify arbitrary headers in the websocket request, so it's typical instead to have credentials supplied via a query param (such as "accessToken" for a bearer token) in the wss request.
Hi HN! I'm Alex, and I've been researching and writing about WebSockets for a while now. I'm the author of the recently released WebSocket Handbook. AMA about the WebSocket tech, the realtime web, Ably or anything related to Liverpool FC.
CRDTs can be the answer. We actually wrote about them recently (https://ably.com/blog/crdts-distributed-data-consistency-cha...), and there is more coming soon as our Chief Of Scientist and his team are researching CRDTs and building demos!