#105 - Technology(3) - Web Server(3) - Installation(II)

Good day, everybody!

Glad to have you here!

I have said it so many times and I will say it again:

The way how we think is more important than what we think and what we know.

To become an expert of something, not only do we need to know what it is and how to use it, more importantly, we need to know why it is what it is.

Almost everyone who's gone to school has studied math. We know how to calculate and remember principles and rules in the field, but very few know why all these things even exist, and of course, few know how to use the knowledge of math to solve their real-life problems. After more than ten years of studying math, most still can't give a 5 minutes speech on it.

With why-questions in mind, I proceed to today's topic. After talked about the basic concepts and ideas of web server, it is time to get our hands dirty.

Like any other kind of research, such as physics, chemistry and ecology, we need a laboratory where we can do scientific tests by using scientific equipment. Fortunately, for our study of web server, I only need a computer and an operating system runing on it, in my case, I use a very old laptop runing Ubuntu 14.04.5 and I am going to install a very popular web sever, Apache, on my system.

Before I go any further, there is one thing we should know first: How to create an application?

In the simplest case, we need two steps to create an application:

Step1: Write source code.

Step2: Compile the source code into an executable file.

A piece of source code includes instructions that tell a machine what to do and how to do it, and compiling the source code is to translate what is written by high-level program language into machine language, so that the machine can understand what we want it to do.

Someone would say "why don't we just write code in machine language?", of course, you can do that, but it is extremely hard, for this topic, I will cover it in the future.

After compilation of source code, we get at least an executable file. If we want to use an application, usually it means that we need to run this executable file.

To use Apache web server on my laptop, I have to install it first. There are two ways to intall Apache web server:

1. Install from its source code.

2. Install from its install package.

I will elaborate these two ways of installation in the next chapter.

Alright, that's all for now and hope it is helpful.

Thanks for your time and let's write some code!

Be serious-minded and be thoroughgoing!

^