Sending an HTTP request
One of my favorite interview questions, which seems to be used by just about everyone, is to ask the interviewee to describe all of the steps of an HTTP request. There are lots of ways you could dig into this. I once had someone explain to me how the computer interprets keyboard presses. While that is fascinating, for now we will walk through the networking side of things.
Let's say you type natwelch.com/resume into your browser. We will go through all of the steps that happen for that to deliver content for your browser to render.
DNS
DNS (domain name system): Computers talk to each other using IP addresses and DNS translates a domain into an IP address. Technically, DNS does a little more than that, but let's start by describing domain names and go from there. In our example, natwelch.com is the domain and /resume is the path.
Figure 3: In all three of the above domains, natwelch on the left is the domain. In the first example, com is the TLD. In the second...
