Stage 4 beginner Free
How Websites Work
See what really travels between your browser and a website — and what sites accidentally give away.
Runs in your browser. Nothing to install — the lesson and a real Linux computer open side by side.
Start Stage 4 →Lesson steps
- Welcome
- A request, up close
- Sending a form
- Status codes and redirects
- Page source
- robots.txt
- Error messages
- Cookies
- Final challenge: the menu preview
- Stage complete
What this stage is
Your lab computer runs a small practice website: a bakery, with a menu, online ordering and a few mistakes of the kind real sites make every day. You'll read its whole conversation with your browser — not just the page you'd see — using curl in the terminal.
It builds on Chapter 1, so do Linux Fundamentals and Networking Basics first.
By the end you'll be able to
- read a full HTTP request and response: methods, paths, headers and status codes
- send a form with POST, and follow redirects
- find what a page sends but the browser hides: comments in the HTML
- explain why
robots.txtand unlinked pages don't hide anything - spot an error message that reveals too much, and say how to fix it
- see how cookies work — and why a site must never trust one
Every step ends with how the site should have avoided the mistake. It finishes with a final challenge that chains several small mistakes together.