HTTP basics

I know you love doing projects claiming you’re consuming APIs without even knowing how it works.

Do you know what HTTP is about?

Don’t blame yourself for coding without knowing what HTTP does, I was like that. Many of these courses don’t encourage knowledge of web fundamentals.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol (a system of rules that defines how data will be transmitted) that allows users to obtain resources, such as an HTML document.

It’s a client-server protocol, the request originates from the recipient and the server handles this request by returning a response.

A very simple example to make it clearer: you post something here on LinkedIn, this is an HTTP request that sends a request to include new data to the server, which in turn executes the request and returns the response.

This response comes with a status, which indicates whether the request was successful or if an error occurred during its execution.

There are different methods for each type of request. But that’s for a future post.

Here I leave a way that illustrates HTTP request response statuses pretty well.

Cheers!