How the Internet works

Start here

Read Mozilla’s great introduction to how the Internet works.

Also, check out this animated guide to how the internet works.

Internet basics

• HTTP Basics, a thorough primer on HTTP.
• What’s a web server? This will tell you.
• Understanding status codes with Status Cats: every HTTP request has a response that is accompanied by a status code like 200 OK or 500 Internal Server Error, and these lovely felines can help you remember them.
• In order to understand how servers work, build a simple server script with Ruby.
• Understanding what JSON is.
• Understanding HTTP methods
• Understanding what APIs are.

Ajax requests

Ajax is a way of making a request to get resources with JavaScript, without reloading or refreshing or redirecting the page. Meaning, it can happen in the background, then update a specific part of the page. This is the concept behind web applications, where interaction with a page–clicking or selecting things, etc–doesn’t force your page to reload, but merely updates that particular part of it.

• Understanding the AJAX request.
• AJAX documentation.
• Understanding how CORS work, cross-domain ajax requests. It’s the concept where the front-end request (JavaScript) isn’t itself officially connected to the server-side application where the data being requested lives. Read about how jQuery and Node interact during a CORS request.

Web frameworks

• Connect a front-end application with a separately-hosted back-end application: this keeps your concerns separate. The alternative is building HTML views with your back-end application or trying to integrate a front-end application onto a back-end application, and it can easily turn into spaghetti code. Here’s an example of the separated elements: building an Angular2 / Rails 5 website and deploying to Heroku, where the front-end is separated out from the back-end. Oh, and if you’re not convinced, read this article on why client-side rendering is a good idea. (That means when HTML pages are generated by client computers, rather than created in a back-end app and sent forward to the client.)
• Understanding PUT vs PATCH vs POST requests: “POST != Create and PUT != Update”

Understanding Caches and Caching

Let’s say I have a computer and I request to view the website “helloworld.com”. The server returns to me several files: an HTML index file, a stylesheet, and several images that the HTML file needs.

Now, let’s say that tomorrow, I ask again for these files by making a request to load “helloworld.com”. In the interim, no changes have been made on the server to those files. So, in order to conserve time and not re-request files that are unchanged, my computer simply re-loads the files it already received for this website, after checking that those files aren’t supposed to be expired.

This process of not re-requesting files is called cacheing, and most modern browsers do this. It’s an effective way of speeding up the loading of a website, but there immediately arises a need to manipulate these caches, for a variety of reasons.

• “Everything You Need to Know About the Browser Cache”: understanding cacheing in the browser
• Heroku, HTTP Caching in Ruby with Rails
• “Using Cache Purge to Keep Your Website Content Fresh and Responsive”

Registering your domain and understanding DNS

• Amazon Web Services is one of the places you can purchase and maintain a domain (a URL). Here’s their welcome packet, and their guide to registering your domain through Amazon Web Services.