Getting started with HTTP

Learn how http status codes classify responses into informational, success, redirection, client error, and server error, with examples like 200, 301, 404, and 500 to diagnose web requests.

Explore http request methods and their crud mappings, learn safe vs unsafe verbs, idempotency, and how techniques like get, post, put, delete, patch, head, and options shape web APIs.

Introduce the http protocol and its role in transferring data on the web. Understand the client-server, stateless request-response model and the basics of get and post, plus TLS/SSL security.

Explore the main http components, including the client and browser, web server, databases, and proxies that route, filter, and balance requests to deliver html.

Explore the http workflow by examining how a client opens or reuses a tcp connection, sends a request, and parses the server's html response, noting http pipelining.

Explore how caching boosts web performance by using browser caching, CDN caching, and proxy caching, with cache-control, ETag, and Last-Modified headers to reduce latency and server load.

Learn how cross-origin resource sharing uses http headers and pre-flight requests to securely manage access across different origins, including access-control-allow-origin, access-control-allow-methods, and access-control-allow-headers.

Troubleshoot and debug http requests with a systematic approach using browser dev tools, status codes, headers, and payloads to diagnose server and client errors, network, and security issues.

Discover what a url is and how it acts as the address to web resources. Compare absolute and relative urls and how browsers fetch data via a path.

Explore the structure of a url, from the scheme and authority to domain, path, parameters, and the fragment, and how each part directs you to the resource.

Learn how url encoding converts non-ascii characters into percent-encoded formats with a percent sign and two hex digits, including spaces replaced by plus signs, so urls transmit safely.

Learn how http sessions use cookies and cryptography to maintain client state, ensure confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity, and manage bandwidth with cookie size and compression.

Explore how WebSockets enable real-time, bidirectional communication over a single long-lived HTTP connection, delivering low latency updates for chat, gaming, finance, and collaboration.

Discover how https uses an ssl certificate and tls to encrypt data, provide authentication, and protect information, with secure sites identified by the url and lock icon.

Understand what an internet protocol address is, how it identifies a host and locates it on a network, and how ip headers enable http routing with ipv4 or ipv6.

Explore how Fiddler, a proxy server, captures and debugs http and https traffic, letting you inspect requests, responses, headers, and saved sessions on your local machine.

Learn to capture and analyze http traffic with Wireshark, comparing it to Fiddler, and observe requests, responses, and protocol details on Windows or Mac.

Take the course quiz featuring multiple choice questions to actively recall what you learned, and share questions or feedback to improve the course.