Is it possible to read only first N bytes from the HTTP server using Linux command?

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You can do it natively by the following curl command (no need to download the whole document). According to the curl man page:

RANGES
HTTP 1.1 introduced byte-ranges. Using this, a client can request to get only one or more subparts of a specified document. curl
supports this with the -r flag.

Get the first 100 bytes of a document:
    curl -r 0-99 http://www.get.this/

Get the last 500 bytes of a document:  
    curl -r -500 http://www.get.this/

`curl` also supports simple ranges for FTP files as well.
Then you can only specify start and stop position.

Get the first 100 bytes of a document using FTP:
    curl -r 0-99 ftp://www.get.this/README

It works for me even with a Java web app deployed to GigaSpaces.

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