A definitive, brilliant, and necessary explanation of how the Internet
works--by the only man who can make us understand
Every day billions of people view billions of web pages. A blank
rectangle in a web browser transforms into The New York Times, or
Google, or, God help us, Yahoo! News. That single home page is often
the work of hundreds of people over thousands of hours. A single page of
The Huffington Post is more complex than the space shuttle. And yet
the more the web becomes part of our lives, the more apparent it is that
we need to understand how it works.
Paul Ford knows how it works, every bit of it. He was one of the first
bloggers--he started well before the term "blog" was coined, and so
programmed all his own web publishing software himself--and he is now a
well-respected technologist and programmer. In The Secret Lives of Web
Pages, he explains what happens when a web page loads into your
browser--from the basic text and headlines to the moment your identity
is stolen--in the most engaging, funny, smart, and accessible way
possible, from a place of love and wonder, and with deep historical
understanding. Based on his own knowledge and experience--including
launching a new start-up, created simultaneously with the book--and
extensive conversations with a who's who of Internet creators (i.e.,
Ford's friends), The Secret Lives of Web Pages is the definitive book
on the web page: what it is, why it happened, and how to understand it.
