This course is about building web applications using Ruby on Rails. But what is a web application? What even is the web? These are all good questions that we often don't think about as we peruse through our daily websites. In order to understand web applications and begin building them, it's essential to understand how we actually interact with them day-to-day. So let's dive in!

Learning Goals 🎯

1. Understand the overall structure of how we communicate with the web
2. Understand how HTTP requests are structured and the different types of requests
3. Be able to send a request to a website using a library or online/command-line tool (such as requests in python or curl on the command line)

Prerequisites 🤔

None!

What happens when you go to www.facebook.com in your browser?

This is where it all begins! Take a second to find a friend and think about this out loud with them.

Questions to consider:

• How did your browser tell facebook that we went to their website?
• What did facebook send back to the browser?
  • What are you seeing as a result of their communication?
• How does facebook.com know to send each of you your own personal newsfeed?

Don't move on before noting down some of your own thoughts!

Answer: It sends a request!