In this course, we'll be creating a dynamic website.

So, let's go over a little bit of theory of how websites operate.

Let's start with the web browser.

A web browser is an application that is used to download and

render HTML and CSS and execute any client side JavaScript.

You type in a website address into a browser's address bar and hit enter, and

it sends a request for information to a server or

a computer on the internet that has that domain name assigned to it.

Part of the information that the server receives in the request is the address or

the URL that the client has entered.

A URL will have a path to a file like index.html.

The software running on the server like Apache or

NGINX, will be configured to look for a certain directory on the server

and look for the file, and in turn reads its contents and

sends it back to the browser.

The way the browsers and the web server agree to communicate is called a Protocol.

The Protocol that the browser and

web servers use is Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP.

You can refer to the software on the server as an HTTP Server and

the browser as an HTTP Client.

Now, what happens when you want a dynamic site, for

example, if I wanted a PHP script to run on my server?

The HTTP Server would need to use a PHP Interpreter to

run the code to generate dynamic content on the page and send it.

So the question is, how does Node.js fit in?

Well, with Node.js you can actually create your own HTTP server programmatically.

Handling URLs, and requests, and responding however you want.

You can serve static files or generate dynamic content.

It's all up to you.

And that's what we'll be doing in this course.

Creating an HTTP server, serving files, and

generating dynamic content all in Node.js.