Appendix A. HTTP Primer
“Excuse me, sir. Might I have a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens?”
“Why certainly, sir! Here it is straight-away.”
While perhaps a tad on the formal side, this simple verbal interaction represents a real-world example of a request for something, followed by a response that satisfies that request. Such simple interactions are the heart and soul of the HTTP protocol—the standard protocol on which the World Wide Web depends.
So what the Dickens does Dickens have to do with the Web? Let’s find out.
A.1. Why should we care about HTTP?
Yes, why? After all, between the browsers and the server-side libraries available to us, we never really have to know what’s going on beneath the surface, do we?
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