A non-technical guide to understanding the web

SEO, HTML, CSS, HTTP, TCP/IP, oh my god why so many letters? If you hear this alphabet soup of acronyms on a regular basis but never knew what they actually meant, this book is for you. This is an introduction to the web and how it works for the non-technical individual.

The book aims to be an easy-to-digest primer of how things work on the web, as well as provide some insight on dealing with developers. Like me 🤓.

Book cover
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Note: this book is open-source and currently work in progress. If you visit often, you will see half-written drafts and some things that make no sense at all. What you're witnessing, is actual work in progress. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Tweet me (@hj_chen) or open a GitHub issue or something.

A non-technical guide to understanding the internet by Chen Hui Jing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . The code in this book may also be considered licensed under an MIT license.

Contents

  1. Preface
  2. What is the internet?
  3. How does the internet work?
  4. So what is the world wide web?
  5. Internet-related jargon demystified
  6. Why do things look different on every browser?
  7. Roles and responsibilities
  8. Why all the fuss about responsive?
  9. Angry developer syndrome
  10. Front-end and Back-end
  11. Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML)
  12. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  13. Javascript (JS)
  14. Attributions