Over the Chinese New Year holiday, I was working through this series of web tutorials on Ruslan’s blog. Indeed, as the articles recommend, typing out and testing each bit of code (using curl) helped me to understand each point the author was trying to illustrate. It’s always nice to get to write something low-level, because the abstractions you work with (sockets, file handles) are all pretty mature so any problems you encounter are most likely to be found in your own code.