Goodreads' data is…not good. So I've returned to one of the oldest tricks in the book: good old scraping - and actually end up with pretty decent data.
Hey there \o. original author of said hubba article :)
Just wanted to offer some missing bits you might find interesting, specifically, the third function you don't recognise is the random function from the original Tetris on the NES. It comes from the article[0] that went through all the asm of the NES Tetris cartridge.
And yup, that first one is quite quite terrible for random - it came from some of the first results in StackOverflow intentionally looking for something that was overly simple and "bad" at random.
But really the article was about testing and visualising how your own random functions might be.
PUT, DELETE, etc were part of HTTP/1.1. The WorldWideWeb browser (later called Nexus) was created during the time of HTTP 0.9 (or rather the versionless HTTP).
I spoke to a few of the people involved in the original 1990s project and one big issue was authentication into servers was way too complex.
The simulation (I wrote the JavaScript for it), writes to local browser storage (IndexedDB), the original WorldWideWeb would write to disk (networked or local).
This doesn't work for everyone, but if you find allow yourself time, trying to solve specific problems you face (asking: could I automate this? Could this be simpler?) is a great way to get better - and how I learnt my way through bash.
I recently released https://terminal.training (paid course for 4 hours) which is just for this kind of question, but I've also started a free mini email course (same URL) that tries to share some of the CLI shortcuts I've come to rely on over the years.
See the web site for details on how it works, and the source code if you wish to host your own implementation.