In the first sentence I think you are nitpicking. After all I pointed to those tools as an aid for understanding how things work "under the hood", which is what

In the first sentence I think you are nitpicking. After all I pointed to those tools as an aid for understanding how things work "under the hood", which is what the OP is after as far as I understand. Even if you take "ping", (which I could have as well not included in the list, as the other tools are less obvious but still tremendously useful) almost everyone knows what it's for, but fewer people know various options it has and yet fewer people know how it really works, what protocol it uses etc. In a similar way, lots of people have used MySQL or PostgreSQL for years, but never read the manuals and have little understanding of all the various capabilities they have and the ins and outs of how they work. It's a blend of theory and practice. I agree with the rest of what you said, and while I did not state it explicitly, I share the sentiment, in fact the Douglas Crockford videos I linked to give a quite detailed account of the development of the Web, including browsers, JavaScript, AJAX etc.