Introduction

Everything curl is an extensive guide to everything there is to know about curl, the project, the command-line tool, the library, how everything started and how it came to be what it is today. How we work on developing it further, what it takes to use it, how you can contribute with code and bug reports and why all those millions of existing users use it.

This book is meant to be interesting and useful to both casual readers and the somewhat more experienced developers, and offers something for you all to pick and choose from. Don't read it from front to back. Read the chapters you are curious about and go back and forth as you see fit.

I hope to run this book project as I do all other projects I work on: in the open, completely free to download and read, free for anyone to comment on, available for everyone to contribute to and help out with. Send your bug reports, pull requests or critiques to me and I will improve this book accordingly.

This book will never be finished. I intend to keep working on it and while I may at some point in time consider it fairly complete and covering most aspects of the project (even if only that seems like an insurmountable goal), the curl project will continue to move so there will always be things to update in the book as well.

This book project started at the end of September 2015.

The book sites

http://bookcurl.haxx.se is the home of this book. It features easy accessible links to read the book online in a web version or download a copy for offline reading using one of the many different versions offered, including PDF, ePUB and MOBI.

https://ec.haxx.se is a shortcut to the HTML version of the book.

https://github.com/bagder/everything-curl hosts all the book content.

The author

With the hope of becoming just a co-author of this material, I am Daniel Stenberg. I founded the curl project. I'm a developer at heart, for fun and profit. I live and work in Stockholm, Sweden.

All there is to know about me can be found on my web site.

Help!

If you find mistakes, omissions, errors or blatant lies in this document, please send me a refreshed version of the affected paragraph and I will make amended versions. I will give proper credits to everyone who helps out! I hope to make this document better over time.

Preferably, you submit errors or pull requests on the book's github page.

License

This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.