Hey, I’m Cami Li and this is codebabes intro to the internet, ready to get mind fucked? You’ll need your computer and a brain. This course goes over the basics of the internet, tools you’ll need to be a bad ass developer, and how Al Gore invented it. Actually, that last part isn’t true. Al Gore is full of shit. A bunch of genius dudes created it over the past few decades, with a little cashola from Uncle Sam. Now pay attention and stop googling me!
So what’s the internet? It’s a giant network of computers, from the computer you're using right now, up to giant server farms, and it’s awesome. There’s still a lot of freedom on the internet, well, except if you live in some fascist country. In the US we still go to any site we want, we’re being watched.
With a little motivation and a great idea anyone can create something amazing on the web. Part of the reason is Net Neutrality, meaning your puny ass site can compete right along with the big boys. Just remember, if you hear the words Net Neutrality, it’s a good thing, support it.
And if you do build something awesome, getting a server big enough to handle a bajillion hits is cheaper than ever. It’s the golden age of the internet, you just need to build something.
Time to get technical. The computer or mobile device you’re on is the client, or client side. The web page you're looking at is getting served up by the server, server side.
When you type in a web URL into a browser, it’s requesting a page from a server somewhere. When the server gets the request, it processes it and sends your browser some files to turn into a webpage.
The ‘server’ is just another computer, probably surrounded by hundreds more in a giant building somewhere. These servers run an operating system like any other computer, usually linux, have a database, and some kind of server side programming language. Thanks to some marketing douche a lot of people call these server farms ‘the cloud’. Sounds more expensive than server farm right?
Two more terms used a lot are back-end and front end. When code gets processed on the server that’s the ‘backend’. We’re talking stuff like PHP, Ruby or Python. Front end refers to stuff getting processed on your computer by the browser, stuff like HTML, CSS and javascript.
We’re going to talk about the backend stuff first, since well, I have a nice backend. If you know what i’m saying.
Questions or Comments?