Here is the proper (Italian) way to cook pasta. They should know, they invented pasta:
Take a pot, fill it with water and put it on the stove, heat it until it boils. Put a lid on, to make it boil faster.
When the water boils, add salt. We use “sale grosso”, my dictionary calls it “cooking salt”. It’s salt in big grains of irregular shapes. You can use the finer table salt, it won’t change the flavor, but you will need a lot more and in my opinion it’s harder to measure the right quantity – but remember: I’m doing this on an almost daily basis, so I’m working out of habit here.