How the Internet Works: A Beginner's Guide

One person’s experience, not advice

Favourl Editorial put together a list of publicly available web pages that helped them, with a note on why each one is here. Favourl hosts the list and the notes — not the pages themselves. Those belong to whoever published them, and linking to a public page is neither an endorsement of it nor any relationship with its owner.

Nobody at Favourl has checked any of it, and a page can change or disappear after it was saved. What worked for one person may not work for you — circumstances differ. Where money, health, law or safety are involved, treat this as a starting point and take proper advice.

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The sequence

In the order Favourl Editorial put them. Each step points at a public page they used; where they left a note, that is the part worth reading.

1
developer.mozilla.org
MDN Web Docs
The reference. Start here for anything HTML, CSS or JavaScript.
Source: developer.mozilla.org
2
hpbn.co
High Performance Browser Networking
Free online. The clearest explanation of TCP, TLS and HTTP for people who build on top of them.
Source: hpbn.co
3
howdns.works
How DNS Works
A comic, and still the fastest way to understand resolution and caching.
Source: howdns.works
4
http3-explained.haxx.se
HTTP/3 explained
Daniel Stenberg on QUIC, and why HTTP changed shape again.
Source: http3-explained.haxx.se
5
web.dev
web.dev: Core Web Vitals
What the metrics actually measure, from the team that defines them.
Source: web.dev
6
letsencrypt.org
Let's Encrypt: How It Works
Certificate issuance end to end. Useful the first time ACME fails on you.
Source: letsencrypt.org

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How the Internet Works: A Beginner's Guide

The sequence

MDN Web Docs

High Performance Browser Networking

How DNS Works

HTTP/3 explained

web.dev: Core Web Vitals

Let's Encrypt: How It Works

Save all 6 links in one tap

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How this was published