In article <[email protected]>, Steven D'Aprano <[email protected]> wrote:
> So, for the benefit of anyone, not just Nikos, who wants to learn about > how browsers connect to web sites and how to run a web server, does > anyone have any recommendation for tutorials, mailing lists, web forums > or books which are suitable? Preferably things you have used yourself, > and can personally vouch for being useful. In the way of tools, tcpdump (or wireshark, or whatever packet sniffer you have handy) is invaluable for seeing what's really going on. Also, curl is an amazing tool for sending arbitrary requests to a HTTP server. It's got a zillion options. You'll want to learn what most of them do. The combination of curl and tcpdump is a pretty potent weapon for poking at servers. An interesting alternative to tcpdump/curl is Google Chrome. Open up the developer tools (Command-Option-I on the Mac), click the network tab, and type a request into the address bar. It will capture the outgoing request and the response you get back, and let you dig into them in as much detail as you want. Very handy, at least for GET requests. I imagine any decent browser has similar functionality. For general background, I would start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http and keep following links from there until you have read the whole wiki or gotten tired, whichever comes first. stackoverflow has become a really good forum for asking all sorts of programming-related questions (although, its sister site, serverfault, is more appropriate for networking questions). I find the U/I confusing, and often find the rules (i.e. what's allowed and what's not) kind of silly, but a lot of really smart people hang out there. If you want a question answered, go where the smart people are. > I'm pretty sure that *somebody* here has been in the position of needing > to learn about running a website, and can point Nikos in the right > direction (away from here). I guarantee the folks on either stackoverflow or serverfault won't put up with the kind of bullcrap that has been pervading this group as of late. If I was using a program, foo, and had a problem, the first thing I would do is google for "foo mailing list" and see if I can find one. You don't always find one, and sometimes the list is dead, but it's a good place to start. > How did you learn? Run. Fall down. Get up. Start running again. Repeat as needed. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
