Skip to Content
Introducing Python
book

Introducing Python

by Bill Lubanovic
November 2014
Beginner
481 pages
10h 11m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Introducing Python

Chapter 9. The Web, Untangled

Straddling the French-Swiss border is CERN—a particle physics research institute that would seem a good lair for a Bond villain. Luckily, its quest is not world domination but to understand how the universe works. This has always led CERN to generate prodigious amounts of data, challenging physicists and computer scientists just to keep up.

In 1989, the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee first circulated a proposal to help disseminate information within CERN and the research community. He called it the World Wide Web, and soon distilled its design into three simple ideas:

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

A specification for web clients and servers to interchange requests and responses

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

A presentation format for results

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

A way to uniquely represent a server and a resource on that server

In its simplest usage, a web client (I think Berners-Lee was the first to use the term browser) connected to a web server with HTTP, requested a URL, and received HTML.

He wrote the first web browser and server on a NeXT computer, invented by a short-lived company Steve Jobs founded during his hiatus from Apple Computer. Web awareness really expanded in 1993, when a group of students at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic web browser (for Windows, the Macintosh, and Unix) and NCSA httpd server. When I downloaded these and started building sites, I had no idea that the Web and the Internet ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Introducing Python, 2nd Edition

Introducing Python, 2nd Edition

Bill Lubanovic
Introduction to Python

Introduction to Python

Jessica McKellar
Serious Python

Serious Python

Julien Danjou
Python Workout

Python Workout

Reuven M. Lerner

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449361167Errata Page