Unix For Beginners

A wireless LAN connects devices to a network over radio using the 802.11 family of standards, through access points that bridge the wireless medium onto the wired network and enforce the authentication and encryption that the shared airwaves demand.

TCP/IP is the family of protocols on which the internet runs: IP moves packets between addresses without guarantees, and TCP or UDP ride on top to deliver either a reliable ordered stream or fast unordered messages.

The OSI model is a seven-layer reference framework that separates networking into physical transmission, link, network, transport, session, presentation and application concerns, used to reason about where a problem sits rather than to describe any real protocol stack.

A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that answers requests for your site from a location near the person asking, instead of sending every request back to the single machine your site runs on.

DNS is the distributed lookup system that turns a hostname such as getting-digital.net into the IP address a browser can connect to, by walking a chain of nameservers whose answers are then cached for a lifetime the domain's owner publishes.

SSL/TLS is the protocol that encrypts the connection between a browser and a server and, by way of a certificate signed by a certificate authority, proves the server is entitled to answer for the domain in the address bar.