The web is an amazing place. It's open, it's free, and almost all the information available to human kind is available any time, any place, and right at our fingertips. It is amazing that we live in an age when the web is just starting to show its colors and full potential. However, if you look at it from another point of view, all the internet really is is just a bunch of computers connected together with wires or, sometimes, wirelessly. It is this illusion that gives us the impression that the internet is actually something bigger, when in fact it's just a large network of computers.
After you are done with this book, you will be adding one more computer to this network, thus doing your own bit to make the internet a better place. To understand how the internet works, we have to first understand the...