1. Introduction to Computers and the Internet

People are using the web to build things they have not built or written or drawn or communicated anywhere else.

—Tim Berners-Lee

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

—Anne Frank

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

—John F. Kennedy

Objectives

In this chapter you’ll learn:

• Computer hardware, software and Internet basics.

• The evolution of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

• How HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript are improving web-application development.

• The data hierarchy.

• The different types of programming languages.

• Object-technology concepts.

• And you’ll see demos of interesting and fun Internet applications you can build with the technologies you’ll learn in this book.