Internet Basics - An introductory guide to Internet fundamentals

Welcome to the Internet Basics section!
This section contains articles that provide a sort of stepping stone for the newbie. We will first cover the history of the Internet and how the it evolved into this gargantuan thing as we know it now. We will then look at certain applications of the Internet that will be very useful to the beginner such as Email, File Transfer Protocol - FTP, URLs etc.

The following topics will be covered in this section (*)

• Internet Basics - Introduction
• History of the Internet
• Internet Fundamentals
• The World Wide Web
• How does data transfer take place?
• Internet Protocols
• Email
• File Transfer Protocol - FTP
• Telnet - Connecting to a remote computer
• HTML basics
• Language on the Internet
• The Client Server architecture
• URLs - What is an URL?
• HTTP protocol- What is HTTP?
• HTTP Client Methods - GET & POST
• HTTP codes

As a beginner you would also be interested in knowing more about the The World Wide Web, how data transfer takes place on the Internet using the various Internet Protocols. I will also provide a brief of HTML, the language used to develop web pages and web sites. [A detailed tutorial on HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is also available on this web site along with the more advanced HTML tutorial]. Technically speaking, HTML is not a language per se... it is rather a set of tags by which a web page can be structured. HTML, thus, is a series of instructions on how a web page should be structured and how its contents should be laid out. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets, the grip of HTML on web page layout has decreased but old habits die hard and most web sites still use HTML in some form to layout a web page.

As the Internet grew, so did the needs of developers. Web pages created using HTML are static which means that they do not change unless the programmer modifies the page and puts it back on the server. The need to have web pages that respond to visitor actions (such as mouse movements, mouse clicks, key presses etc.) and contain dynamic content paved the way for the development of various languages on the internet. The Internet languages are of two types; client-side languages, those that run on a browser (a client) and server-side languages, those than run on the server. The former is used to develop pages that respond to user actions such as mouse movements, mouse clicks, key-presses etc. while the latter is employed for integrating web sites with databases, displaying content based on user's choices, sending emails and several other applications.

The article on Client Server architecture, explains how a client interacts with a server and thus, how simple and complex web pages are delivered to a browser on your desktop from a machine that might be miles and miles away. Complex web pages are those that have bits of programming code (developed using the Internet Languages) either embedded or integrated with the HTML.

It is, therefore, necessary for you to get a firm grip on Internet basics such as protocols, email, data transfer process, client-server architecture and URLs. This helps in building an understanding of the basic Internet structure and processes.

* Note: Articles on HTTP protocol, the list of client methods and status codes may not be regarded as Internet basics and are for the more experienced. Skip these if you are a beginner. What are these doing in the Internet Basics section? Well, I did not know where else to place them :-)