Throughout the course of my career, I've gone through a number of emotional stages when it came to interacting with non-technical people. Especially those who have a direct impact on my work. My emotional states could be accurately expressed through the following emojis (come on, you know each emoji has a text name, right):

• loudly crying
• screaming in fear
• persevering
• angry
• pouting
• weary

None of those emotions were particularly positive. But then I realised, it was my fault for not explaining things clearly up front. I was assuming that they had the same level of knowledge as I did, and that was ludicrous! I was the one who lived and breathed the web, not them.

Most people are not unreasonable. Even if they may seem so at times, and those times can almost always be attributed to some form of communication breakdown. As developers, sometimes we don't do ourselves any favours by not communicating well to the non-developers. If they think what you're doing is magic, maybe you want to rethink your communication strategy.

I want to explain the web in terms that everyone can understand. And to de-mystify what seems like magic to many. It's not enough to know rudimentary HTML and CSS and call it a day. There is so much more than that. Like, how the internet actually works. Why expecting things to look the same across all browsers is not a good idea. What is actually going on when a website "goes down"?

I hope that this book can be an easy-to-digest primer of how things work on the web, as well as provide some insight on dealing with developers. Like me.

Note: this book is open-source and currently work in progress. If you visit often, you will see half-written drafts and some things that make no sense at all. What you're witnessing, is actual work in progress. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Tweet me (@hj_chen) or start a discussion or something.