Understanding the Digital Revolution A Beginner's Guide to the Internet and the Web

How does the most important technology of our time - the Internet and WWW – work? The authors explain in simple language and in short the individual technical building blocks and organizational structures, behind the greatest innovation of our time. Only those who know how the technologies that determine our everyday lives can deal with them confidently and in souvereignity. Although digitalization is shaping our daily lives, the technologies behind the Internet and WWW remain obscure to most people. This book provides the key to understanding the huge developments of our time.

Welcome to the Network of Networks.- Brave New (Digital) World.- A Brief History of the Internet.- How Does a Computer Network Work?.- LAN The Basic Building Block of the Internet.- WLAN The Network in the Ether.- Wide Area Networks The Nervous System of the Internet.- How Do Our Media Get into the Computer?.- Pixel Codes BMP, JPEG, PNG, and Co.- The Sound out of the Machine.- From Flip Book to Video Streaming.- Internetworking How to Globally Interconnect Local Networks?.- The TCP/IP Protocol Stack The Operating System of the Internet.- IPv4 The Good Spirit of the Internet.- IPv6 The Future of the Internet (of Things).- IPv6 How the Internet Finds its Countless Connected Devices.- TCP or How Do I know that my Data Packet has Arrived?.- Of Handshakes and Ports Data Connection via TCP.- From Emails to Streaming: Nothing Works Without Application Protocols.- The Domain Name System The Phone Book of the Internet.- How Emails Reach Their Recipients.- How Email Became the Prime Communication Channel.- How Email Became the Prime Communication Channel.- How the WWW Changed Our World.- HTTP, HTML, and CSS Our Little Helpers on the Web.- How the Internet Became the Largest Media Library in the World.- Who Governs the Internet.

Christoph Meinel is the Founding President of the German University of Digital Sciences and previously has been Director and CEO of the Hasso Plattner Institute. He heads the Internet Technologies and Systems department and is author of numerous scientific publications, developer of large digital systems, such as openHPI.de and HPI Schul-Cloud, and a sought-after consultant for politics and business.

Maxim Asjoma is Head of Public Partnerships at Hasso Plattner Institute and holds a doctorate in philosophy with a specialization in economics and digitalization. The focus of his work interest is how digital technologies are transforming societies.