First off, you must use common sense when surfing the web. Look before you click! Why are you clicking the link? How do you know the site won't try to mug you? Commonsense precautions we're sure you exercise in real life. Be smart, and don't get a bug.
Before we plunge into network theory and client-server models, let's take a quick survey of the net.
These sites are the bread and butter of your internet experience. If you find a site that directly addresses your interests, that is excellent. However, these spots are good starting spots1:
How did we ever live without search engines? These sites trawl the web and let you search for relevant sites, making a process of searching out good sites very, very easy.
This is the search engine to consult. If google doesn't have it, then... well, who knows? It's also so simple to use, it's impossible to get lost, which is very good for new internet users. If you're one of those new internet users, keep google close to your heart.
Now that we're done prosthelytizing for google, here's some more search engines:
Search engines are not perfect. It's "only" a computer sifting through websites, after all. Directories, or sites that have lists of sites that are human compiled. Such sites have promote sites that humans think are important and useful, which can be more useful than a list of computer choosen sites. The ODP This is probably the best directory out there. It certainly is the largest, and it's pretty good as far as relevancy goes. The ODP.
First off, I cannot speak for the reliablity of this directory: I've never used it. However, it's yahoo, so it can't be bad. If the ODP doesn't cover it, certainly try here at yahoo's directory.
So, you don't want to wade through search results nor wade through directory sites that someone else thinks is helpful. You can use a reference, like an encyclopedia or other source of know-it-all information. We'll start with a controversial source, which also happens to be one of the largest.
Yes, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit! It's huge, exhaustive, and... inaccurate? Since anyone can edit it, and not everyone is a genius, people that forget things or want to deframe something can get in the articles and twist them. Most inaccuracies are killed quickly, but some tend to linger, especially in unpopular parts of the site. If you keep these facts in mind, take everything with a grain of salt, and check it with real sources, then you'll be fine with wikipedia.
If you don't trust wikipedia, then you can always try the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is checked by experts, and has, at most, a few inaccuracies. For a secure encyclopedia, try here.
Rather have real people behind the answers2? Then yahoo answers is a resource for you! Just grab a yahoo account, and you can ask questions, and anyone can answer. Hopefully, you'll get a good answer from all the people that respond, and if you ask well, it's likely that you will. Try yahoo answers.
Okay, I'm sorry. Myspace is evil. I have to agree with that. But if you're going to be surfing around the web, and you're younger than 20, you'll probably already have a profile on myspace. And if you're going to be out "socializing", you'll want to follow a few guidelines.
First of all, don't be stupid. If you're going to be meeting someone in real life, then be careful. Did I mention don't be stupid? If you dont't know what you're doing, don't add ramdom people as your friends.
And whatever you do, don't post stupid bullitens every 10 minutes. Please. And if you do so, don't expect anyone to read them. And if you get a chain bulliten, please chech out snopes. Snopes is now your best friend!
This site isn't so bad, as the population is invite only. However, it's mostly only for college people, although they do have high school support. It might change in the near future, but until there's a backlash against myspace3 then that's the place to be.
This piece of advice goes for forums, chatrooms, google groups, youtube, blogs, anywhere you can leave a comment; don't be rude and obnoxious! Just because no one can see you being rude and obnoxious doesn't mean you have free reign to be juvenile. Please. For the sake of the sane world.
Okay, enough ranting, now we'll move onto the nitty gritty of networking.
Surely you have heard of networking. If not in a computer setting, then in the real world, whereas you have a "network" of friends or a television network. If you crave a dictionary-esque definition, a network is a way of combining several different disparate parts and linking them together. The internet is a network, albeit a very large one. You might have a home network (especially if you have cable or dsl)4 or you might have seen some people using a wireless network at the local starbucks. Now, we'll teach you a little bit about how networks work.
If you have a router (you should know if you do; otherwise, ask your local nerd) and an ethernet cable, then just plug (router)
The only way the opposite sides of the world are connected through the internet is by optic fiber. If you really want to, you could find a copy of The World Is Flat and read that, but it gives a brief history of how phone companies, in stringing up bundles of fiber optics worldwide, went bankraupt but paved the way for the zippy cross-continent internet speed we see today. In a more down-to-earth example, local networks are probably strung together with ethernet cords
Yes, it's a intimidating title. But it's a very simple topic; it's just the way computers talk to each other. For instance, let's say we have two computers linked onto a network. Through divine intervention, computer A (client) knows that computer B (server)5 has a document that it(A) wants. So, computer A asks computer B, over the network, for the file.
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B, being nice, will give it to A, again over the network.
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And that's how networks essentially work! Of course, things aren't always that simple: how does that divine intervention part work anyways? Well, let's take a look at how you can find a site for your research paper.
In this case, divine intervention is really quite mundane: google is always in the same spot in the internet (http://google.com). Therefore, you, the client, know that you can ask google for a list of sites that are relevant to a search term. After asking google, a server, for such a list, you can look up the address of a site that looks good, and then ask that server for the site you're looking for. Finally, you have your site with no divine intervention required.
If you don't use a web browser as your email client, then your email client must find the email servers that serve the recepients of your mail. For instance, you(joe@mu.edu) are going to send a note to jeff@foo.com and bob@bar.org. Your email client will then ask the server mu.edu to send a few emails, and send mu.edu the messages. Then, mu.edu, noticing that you are sending mail to the foo.com and bar.org email servers, for the users jeff and bob, will then ask the servers foo.com and bar.org to recieve a few emails, and send them the emails. If you noticed, the server mu.edu actually turns into a client to foo.com and bar.org for a quick second, while it's channeling the email to them. Not that you should go around calling email servers 'clients', it's just a little amusing oddity.
So you start up pidgin (or whatever else you use) and you can suddenly talk to people. First, the im client finds the im server that the particular service uses, and tells that server it wants to log in, or let everyone know that he's around. Then, the server changes the person's status to 'logged in', and if the client asked for a list of which of his buddies are logged in too, the server will tell the client that too. Then, our client wants to talk to a friend. If you don't directly connect, all communication goes through the server: you tell the server you want to tell your friend "hello". The server, in turn, links to your friend as a client, and tells him "so and so said 'hello'". Then, your friend can respond in kind.
Hopefully, you're picking up the gist of this whole client-server thing, because we'll be looking at how Windows does LANs next.
You're probably already hooked into a lan, and if you read the note above, you might have a couple of questions, like: what is a router? And why do I need to be 'networked', anyways? Why not just link the computer into the internet? First, a router is a piece of equipment that hides the network from the rest of the world. To the rest of the world, your network looks like one computer, the router. The router decides who asked for what, and how the information for several clients in the network should be 'routed' to the right people.
Routers also allow computers to access each other, the benefit in being in a Windows-based lan. If you have a home network, you should be able to access the files on different computers on the network, specifically, those placed in the 'shared documents' folder on each computer. The place to access such information from another computer is My Computer>My Network Places, under either Local Network or, strangely enough, Internet. If you're in a corporate enviornment, you might also have network drives that show up in My Computer: they certainly aren't local, but they exist on the network. The benefits of having such shared folders and network drives are debateable. Do you need to share files on a home network, for example? If you do have a compelling reason, though, it can make life a whole lot easier.
Enough about the abstract: let's move into the nitty-grity of the hard hardware world.