15 Things I learned about Networking

  1. A computer can act as a Client and as a Server.

  2. A computer is the Client when it requests data from the Server. Ex: When you enter "https: //www. youtube.com" in the browser, the browser sends the request to Youtube servers. Here your computer ACTs as a Client.

  3. Can a Computer act as a Client and Server both at the same time ? Yes like localhost.

  4. A computer is the server when it sends the requested data to the Client. Ex: Then Youtube's server responds by sending HTML data to your Computer. Which is rendered by your browser and information is displayed.

  5. Server sends data to the Client in the form of JSON, XML or HTML.

  6. "https: //www. google.com:443/search?....". Lets dissect this URL.

  7. "https" -> This can be expanded as "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure". This is the protocol being used for sharing data(Anything like photos, videos, docx) between client and the server. There are other protocols such as "FTP", "SMTP", "HTTP", etc.

  8. Protocol can be understood as a way of communication between client and server.

  9. "google.com" -> Domain Name of the website you are visiting. Consider this example try entering "8.8.8.8" in the URL of your browser. You will reach google.com homepage why ? Because this is the IP address of the google's server.

  10. To reach a website you need to know its IP Address. Its tedious for us humans to remember IP address of all the websites we like to visit example reddit, yahoo, netflix, primevideo, instagram, etc. That's why we have DNS AKA Domain Name System which converts the Domain Names like instagram.com into IP addresses for us. Like a map data structure which maps domain names -> IP addresses.

  11. Server can either complete your request by sending "Status Code: 200" or can send error like "Error 404 not found".

  12. ":443" This is default port number for https requests. NOT exactly sure why we have this. Default port number for http is "80".

  13. "/search?=..." This is the routing address. For example if you have your website "yourname.com" This address will land you to the Homepage and "yourname.com/about" will land you to its About Page. Things after the ? are query.

  14. URI = Uniform Resource Identifier, URL = Uniform Resource Locator, URN = Uniform Resource Name. URI = URN + URI. URI is like Person's Name + Address used to uniquely identify him and URL is like his address which is used to uniquely identify him.

  15. Thank you boot.dev for such amazing lectures.