Google publishes book to explain internet technologies
20 Nov 2010
Search engine Google, commemorating the 20th anniversary of publication of a paper crucial to the web's development, has published an online book to explain how the internet works.
Chrome product marketing manager Min Li Chan wrote in the Google Blog that the book was aimed at answering basic questions about the internet and surfing.
Min wrote, ''how do browsers and the web actually work? What is HTML5 - or HTML, for that matter? What do terms like ''cookies'' or ''cloud computing'' even mean? More practically, how can we keep ourselves safe from security threats like viruses when we're online? To help answer these questions, we collaborated with the wonderful illustrator Christoph Niemann to publish an online guidebook called ''20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web.''
This handy guide is for those of us who'd like to better understand the technologies we use every day.''
The book uses the latest web language HTML5, and is therefore available offline once the site has been downloaded.
''We built ''20 Things'' in HTML5 so that we could incorporate features that hearken back to what we love about books-feeling the heft of a book's cover, flipping a page or even reading under the covers with a flashlight,'' wrote Min.
The book covers 19 different topics starting from "What Is the Internet?" It then goes on to deal with topics like cloud computing, web apps, internet cookies, web programming languages, browsers, privacy, security and open source.
Min says, "For things you've always wanted to know about the Web and browsers but may have been afraid to ask, read on at www.20thingsilearned.com."