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Ask HN: Good book to learn modern networking?

326 points by charliebwrites 3y ago

I'm looking for a book to get up to speed on networking in 2024 Including classical topics from sockets, to the TCP/IP stack, to DNS, to AnyCast, and similar layers and technologys, but also modern networking setups that might include cloud providers, or other 2024-ish considerations

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Can anyone here comment about their experiences using ChatGPT to learn networking concepts? Are the responses accurate?
sgt 3y ago
W.Richards
The_Colonel 3y ago
I've tried in the past to read some books on the topic but failed. Too much theory, too little practice. Is there some gamified course? Perhaps literally a game? I remember playing a game where you build your CPU with NANDs, is there something like that for networking maybe?
- nathan_douglas 3y ago
  It's more focused on security than just networking, and I don't believe it's quite what you're looking for, but https://tryhackme.com/ https://tryhackme.com/ might be enjoyable.
- mfro 3y ago
  Not sure if there are any genuine games for the subject, but HackTheBox (labs and academy) have some very fun challenges that will force you to learn a decent bit about networking along the way. I personally feel I learn the most about networking messing around with a homelab, VMs or GNS3/Packet Tracer. Try and get a DHCP server setup, then connect clients, then subnet, then give it some vulnerabilities and find a reason to sniff traffic with wireshark. Each layer and protocol is its own beast so there's a lot to learn, I find it best to immerse in it all and understand how they interconnect.
mwn 3y ago
I use Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach for my classes on computer networks and distributed systems and on a theoretical level its a good read. My students appreciate the visual presentations. Modern networking setups depend a lot on the area of scope. Do you want to understand IP networks, tier-1 internet backbone, mobile networks, private networks, data center architecture, distributed web applications, etc.
thesurlydev 3y ago
Julia Evans has some good zines as a starting point and does a great job of distilling complexity and making topics like this approachable to newcomers. [1] I'd also recommend "Network Basics for Hackers" by OccupytheWeb [2] [1] https://wizardzines.com/ https://wizardzines.com/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BS3GZ1R9 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BS3GZ1R9
megraf 3y ago
Network hobbyist here: an excellent home project is to setup your own PBX. Complete with VLAN's, and backups running on your favorite HV. Most importantly, use hard phones with SCCP. It's a challenge of itself, and will force you to demonstrate your understanding
zdw 3y ago
https://systemsapproach.org/books/ https://systemsapproach.org/books/ Bruce and Larry's 6th edition of Computer Networking: A Systems Approach is free to read online, or you can buy a copy. Both have a long list of achievements in the networking space. Recently they've been publishing smaller more focused books on many topics. (full disclosure, I helped write the Edge Cloud OPs one)
- ayewo 3y ago
  5 years ago, the authors put an older edition of the book (5.4?) as a free download from GitHub: https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/tree/format/published https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/tree/format/publishe... Direct link to an older PDF: https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/blob/format/published/book.pdf https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/blob/format/publishe...
nailer 3y ago
You (and everyone else on HN) want The Illustrated Network. https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Network-How-Works-Modern/dp/0128110279 https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Network-How-Works-Modern/... The previous best book was TCPIP Illustrated. The author of Illustrated Network was a fan of TCPIP Illustrated and wrote their book as a modern equivalent. Excerpt: https://wgoralski.com//wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Illustrated-Network-2nd-edition-Chapter-4.pdf https://wgoralski.com//wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Illustrate...
rramadass 3y ago
There is tons to study here but you have to get your fundamentals right else you will completely get overwhelmed/confused by the cacophony of jargon/acronyms/devices. The following lay the foundations; 1. An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking : ATM Networks, the Internet, and the Telephone Network by S.Keshav 2. Foundations of Modern Networking: SDN, NFV, QoE, IoT, and Cloud by William Stallings. 3. The TCP/IP Guide by Charles Kozierok - http://www.tcpipguide.com/ http://www.tcpipguide.com/ 4. Hands-On Network Programming with C: Learn socket programming in C and write secure and optimized network code by Lewis Van Winkle. 5. The All-New Switch Book: The Complete Guide to LAN Switching Technology by Rich Seifert and James Edwards. To get an idea of the overall Internet Architecture/Layouts, i also recommend the following two old books to get the background information. Things have changed a lot now but are almost always built/modified on the bedrock described here. a. Internet System Handbook by David Lynch and Marshall Rose. b. Internet Architectures by Daniel Minoli and Andrew Schmidt. Finally, you should look at all the configuration parameters of your home router (wan+lan+wifi), go through their documentation/google as necessary and make sure you understand what they are and how they are used. This is where the theory read from the above books meets practice in the real world.
krick 3y ago
It doesn't cover everything, but I liked "High Performance Browser Networking" by Ilya Grigorik. It was very straightforward, and focused on what's relevant today in the browser. However, that "today" was 11 years ago already (huh, time flies) and didn't cover what's relevant in 2024, like practical issues of dealing with CDN. Also, it really was browser-focused, so there wasn't anything on how VPNs work and such.
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
CCNA books I had classes using those. Not a programmer. Guess u dont learn CCNA in CS degree?
- zerkten 3y ago
  It doesn't seem to be that consistent, at least in the US. In the UK about 20 years ago it seemed that most universities had a networking course that would at least get someone to the point of being able to converse with a CCNA even if they went into much more academic detail. My uni ran optional UNIX-titled courses outside of the degree to ensure staff and students had access to some practical training. It touched on Linux networking too. I'm now in the US and I find I'm horrified at the level of networking knowledge, but occasionally impressed at the level of knowledge on other topics. It's no consistent set of topics because there seems to much more flexibility. The UK is fairly rigid with electives.
dogman144 3y ago
A good progression I think is these books in order and 2 labs: - Kurose, Computer Networks a top down approach - tcp/ip illustrated volume 1 - the no starch tcp/ip book For labs, - at your workplace or homelab, I’d click through the network configs in your cloud. This hits maybe on “modern networking,” although the theories in the books will match to what you see in cloud just maybe with cloud product names. Reading through terraform repos is also good - GNS3 lab software to build networks you read about in those books. Or tbh, just doing a net+ cert would get you in a good place for basic competency to augment a dev job. Top of mind - there is a logic to it and it’s quite interesting technology. Learn to thing in terms of protocols and their rules and it’ll open up.
jonesdc 3y ago
Would you all have any book (or YouTube) suggestions for an absolute beginner to learn from?
- plexman 3y ago
  keith barker is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AX9LandYJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AX9LandYJU this is the beginner track form cisco https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/article/200-301-ccna-study-materials https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/article/200-301-ccna-stu... this book is still great `CCNA - Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide (6th, 07) by Lammle, Todd`
ary 3y ago
Adding to the already good recommendations on this thread: - Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols (https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Internetworking-Protocols/dp/0201634481/ https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Int...) It covers a broader range of topics than some of the other books mentioned here and helps with an understanding of where existing tech comes from and why. Also it covers topics that you don't necessarily need to know if you're only operating in a cloud environment, but that help to understand what is going on in those far off data centers.
- dayofthedaleks 3y ago
  This book is so great. The author _invented Spanning Tree_ and it's still a great foundational text along with Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated vols 1&2. Hardcopies of all 3 are dirt cheap and eternally valuable for the endpaper diagrams while inspecting packet captures alone.
redleader55 3y ago
It's not exactly what you asked for, but if you're interested in the low level, algorithmic part, I recommend "Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures".
chrisweekly 3y ago
High-Performance Browser Networking -- https://hpbn.co https://hpbn.co -- is a great book and website.
scrps 3y ago
It doesn't qualify as a book but reading RFCs has always been my go to if I want to understand a protocol albeit RFCs can be a bit... Dry. https://www.rfc-editor.org/ https://www.rfc-editor.org/
emmanueloga_ 3y ago
How about https://zguide.zeromq.org/ https://zguide.zeromq.org/ ? I have seen people recommend this dearly but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
sciencesama 3y ago
there are a lot of things that are at play here, networking has been a commoditised and defragmented place even now, there is a tug of war that is always happening between companies who want to commoditise like cisco and junipers who emphasise a lot on the hardware and less on software, there is no proper gui for cisco or juniper products till now. and there is linux networking with tun and tap. one good book is to look at automation of networking (Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer) which does a good job on the history and is a latest book which goes over a wide variety of places where networking can change. if you delve into kubernetes and virtual networking it is a beast on its own !! so for modern networking just do a lab and do a packet capture and you are good to go ! learning basics gets you no where ! it is like reading how alphabets are formed but never gets you write a poem, use chatgpt when you have a doubt and move on to next topic. topics you need to look at are ipaddressing, bgp, vxlan, iptables thats it !
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rramadass 3y ago
This might be what you are looking for; The Illustrated Network: How TCP/IP Works in a Modern Network by Walter Goralski. Take a good look at the ToC, covers a lot of different aspects of a "Modern Network". Start with this and then follow up with other detailed books some of which are mentioned in my other comment in this thread.
NukedOne 3y ago
When it comes to the networking theory, you can't go wrong with Andy Tanenbaum's book.
genmud 3y ago
I'm still a fan of TCP/IP illustrated (book 1) [1] for understanding the fundamentals. The one from No Starch Press [2] is also a great book. Personally, I think if you understand the fundamentals, you will quickly realize things like software defined networks and CDN technologies are just abstractions on top of other stuff. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wesley-Professional-dp-0321336313/dp/0321336313/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wes... [2] - https://nostarch.com/tcpip.htm https://nostarch.com/tcpip.htm
- rsync 3y ago
  "I'm still a fan of TCP/IP illustrated (book 1) [1] for understanding the fundamentals." Agreed. I find it difficult to gratuitously study a broad topic and instead prefer to learn by building and doing. However, that book was one of the most readable, well paced and well presented books and it really did give me a good broad understanding that I rely on even now, 25 years later. Even if you think a book just about TCP/IP is pigeonholing you and you'd like a broader picture of "computer networking" I would still start with this - the design decisions and solutions described can be applied very broadly. A good example of this is the discussion of exponential backoff algorithms ... that's useful everywhere.
- justtinker 3y ago
  Warning about old books. (The NoStarch one is from 2005) Given that IPv4 Evolved a lot over the last 20 years to manage the complexity of address assignment and shortages, everyone should be aware that IPV6 has changed too. The chapter on IPv6 just barely hint and the development of IPv6 in real world cases. Don't take an almost 20 year old book for gospel for IPv4 or IPv6. Policy and implementation practice has changed enormously. Look at documentation from the last few years and from good sources. EG Apnic is the Regional Internet Registry for Asia. https://blog.apnic.net/2023/04/04/ipv6-architecture-and-subnetting-guide-for-network-engineers-and-operators/ https://blog.apnic.net/2023/04/04/ipv6-architecture-and-subn... Also a good source of info and opinions is the Packet Pusher set of podcasts. https://packetpushers.net/ https://packetpushers.net/ I find that they tend to have a very real world explanation of topics covered and they avoid the "I've doing networking for 20 years. Don't tell I have to change" attitude.
p1esk 3y ago
Classical topics haven't changed, just work through the Stevens book again to refresh your memory. For "modern" topics you have to be more specific - what exactly do you want to know?
smashed 3y ago
Good on you for wanting to learn about it. Two things strike me as odd about networking compared to many other IT/software fields: First, it evolves much, much slower than anything else. Everything I learned 2 or even 3 decades ago is still relevant. Ethernet, DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP. New things got bolted on but everything old is still relevant. Yes, even in the modern cloud. Second, I've met so few in the fields that actually understand anything about networking. Even as basic as an ip address and subnet. As long as the web page loads and the data is flowing, people stop caring fast. When the network breaks, most software devs are stomped and can't even do the most basic troubleshooting. My only recommendation is to start with the absolute basic and learn from first principles. Ethernet, IPv4 (packets, IP addresses, subnets, routes), UDP, DHCP, DNS, TCP, HTTP, tunnels and VPNs, in that order. Use wireshark along the way and research everything that is unclear before going up the stack. Try to run your own router/firewall using openwrt or pfsense/opnsense.
- nforgerit 3y ago
  > When the network breaks, most software devs are stomped and can't even do the most basic troubleshooting. Not that I'm an expert myself, but I've seen the same patterns and concluded that to be a symptom of a set of technologies whose abstractions are leaking much less than others. It e.g. rarely happens that you have to run Wireshark and the likes to debug why an image doesn't show up in your app.
  - foofie 3y ago
    I'm also not an expert, but I would wager that networking doesn't change as fast as other computing-related topics because a big chunk of it is implemented in hardware, which is very expensive to change/upgrade, and that new network elements need to be compatible and integrated into existing networks, which don't easily change because its very expensice to change/upgrade and needs to remain compatible with other networking elements.
- deleted 3y ago
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- bvvg 3y ago
beeburrt 3y ago
I’ve been using http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/online_lectures.htm http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/online_lectures.htm which is a course by authors of Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach
- Cwizard 3y ago
  We used this book in my university class on networking. I can also recommend it.
- mvcatsifma 3y ago
  Seconded; I also recommend this book.
teleforce 3y ago
For me Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach (CNTDA) by Kurose is still the best textbook out there to learn modern networking: https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/index.php https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/index.php Starting with the 6th edition, it has separated control and forwarding planes for the network layer to reflect the increasing popularity of software-defined networking (SDN) i.e. evolution of hardware centric to software centric networking. The fact that even before 6th edition when the chapter on networking is still monolithic (combined chapter on control and forwarding), it has already mentioned about the separation concerns between the control and forwarding planes while other popular textbooks still not highlighting this important matter. In addition, unlike many textbooks you can download all the supporting materials slides, exercises, animation, etc, of the from the authors' public website and Prof. Kurose video lectures are also available in Youtube. My main wish lists for the next edition (9th) hopefully include Smart-NIC for modern approach to in-network computation and also the newly standardized segment routing for network layer QoS. If there's The Nobel Prize in Literature for textbook authors, the authors of this book should be more than deserving.
- diego_sandoval 3y ago
  I read the 7th edition and I agree with you. It's a great book. My wish would be for the section/mention of NAT to be expanded on and discuss NAT traversal mechanisms.
- arwineap 3y ago
  The licensing of this book is not something I've ever seen before... I'm unable to buy it ?
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    $699 for a paperback copy. God I love textbooks.
    - lannisterstark 3y ago
      Libgen exists purely for this reason. $50? Sure. $100? Eh sure why not? $700? lol.
Shane325 3y ago
High-Performance Browser Networking: https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/
- luisgvv 3y ago
  From time to time I find myself coming back to this one, it's short and concise. Of course if you want to go deeper this one doesn't cut the deal
- adhamsalama 3y ago
  A very good book for web developers. I read it a couple of months ago. It's very useful and I highly recommend it, even if it doesn't go deep into the details like other books.
cvhashim04 3y ago
Going through Hussein Nasser course right now, which is a good guide for noobs like myself.
teeray 3y ago
Books are good, but don’t underestimate the power of overcomplicated home networking as a teaching project. Pick up some gear and VLAN your network so all the IoT stuff is on its own network away from your protected devices (also make it so IoT devices can only talk to the WAN). Set up a guest network. Make it so you and guests can stream to your streaming devices but guests can’t ping your protected devices (this one is a whoooole thing involving MDNS and reflectors). Set up a site-to-site Wireguard VPN with a cloud VNet (try it without using Tailscale first). Set up a Pi-Hole, then DNAT all DNS traffic to it. Come up with a fun naming scheme for your machines (mine are all ships from The Expanse). Set up DNS nicely so you never have to remember IPs. Anyway, those are just some ideas that come to mind.
- scubbo 3y ago
  Having done almost all of these - I still feel like I know about 2% of how networking actually works :laugh: VPCs are just so unnecessarily complicated!
- dml2135 3y ago
  Ha this is me right now. I’ve got the VLAN segmentation down, but now getting casting and airplay working across VLANs with mDNS has me a bit stumped. Definitely a bit tricker than I anticipated, I thought I’d just need to write firewall rules. For me everything is named after things from Dune :)
  - ta1243 3y ago
    mdns is a right pain as it uses the range for local subnet only, and has a TTL of 1, so you can't just pim route it round your network like normal multicast. You need a device which will reflect messages between all the different vlans -- avahi-daemon is popular
- 0xBDB 3y ago
  This is a good list. To make it more modern (i.e., software defined or infrastructure as code or whatever buzzword is current) you could then do it all in Terraform, Ansible, etc. on a Proxmox / PFSense / VMWare home lab. Maybe even add GitOps - e.g. install a GitHub Actions agent locally and have it run the Terraform etc. against your lab servers automatically when you commit it.
corethree 3y ago
Are there any books or resources to learn troubleshooting, debugging with linux networking. Like I can read the books and know the theory, but deploying the theory in reality needs a lot of intuition that can only be gained through experience. That's what all the training materials are missing. I want to fast track this section with practical practice problems.
- lanstin 3y ago
  Meet people and solve their network problems. Whether at work or family or where ever, any time you solve a tricky problem you learn more and people bring you more in the future, plus you helped them which is a nice feeling. Also like they said above, build yourself a wonderfully complex home or small office network and maintain it. I would also say smaller companies are better for learning the basics as in large companies oftentimes you won’t even know someone allowed to touch cables but in a small company one person has broader responsibility or access to cool problems.
  - corethree 3y ago
    right but I want a resource that will get me from 0 to 10 much faster. Like a set of 20 problems I can troubleshoot designed to help me learn quickly. The reason why learning something likely calculus is so straight forward is because you can just do tons of problem sets and eventually you develop the instinct for it which by default comes with understanding. I want the same thing for networking. Problem sets is the key. I guess this is a start up idea.
    - DANmode 3y ago
      The port is rated for 1Gbps, but the connection speed shown on the client's Windows Machine network status is only 10Mbps. What do you do to resolve?
      - corethree 3y ago
        Give me a domain. For example right now I can use chatGPT or Google to solve which I would do in the real world. But my goal is to get familiar with tooling. I want a restricted domain, but not so restricted that I can deduce the answer.
ajoseps 3y ago
for classic network programming that's relatively hands on and has a lot of examples, beej's guide to network programming is great (and free online): https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/ https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/
usrbinenv 3y ago
"Networking for Systems Administrators" by Michael W. Lucas. In retrospect, should've been called "Networking for programmers". Short. Concise. Examples for all operating systems including Windows. That will get you started. After that, to level-up, any book with good ratings would do. And you will also know which part of the networking stack you want to learn more about, thus, you'd pick the correct book for yourself. But this one is a must have if you're feeling very uncertain about your understanding of networking concepts and how everything glues together.
- BarbaryCoast 3y ago
  Wanted to bump this. It's the book I recommend when someone asks, "How can I learn networking". My next favorite is the Top-Down book everyone above mentions. I like that it starts with loading a web page, instead of bits on a wire. And they have pcap files so you don't even need a lab. The Stevens book is the standard text for programmers writing network code. Beej's Guide (https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/ https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/) Is how I learned. By the time you get here, you'll know enough to know which book to read next.
- sciencesama 3y ago
  also can add this new book Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer
- smitty1e 3y ago
  Just arrived in the mail today, in fact. I'm turning into a bit of a fan of his stuff: https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=michael+w.+lucas https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=michael+w.+lucas
jrflowers 3y ago
How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie
- uhinta 3y ago
  It's great for peoples, the question is probably asked for machines.
mindcrime 3y ago
I don't really have any book recommendations for you (shocking, I know!) but I'll just offer this up by way of encouragement. I think what you're proposing to do is a great idea, and I wholeheartedly endorse having everyone (at least everyone in "the tech industry" or even tangential to it) learn at least the basics of networking. To illustrate why I say this, let me give you some back story. In the late 1990's (98 or thereabouts) I was working in IT, but not as a programmer. I still had not finished my C.S. degree, and I wasn't applying for any programming jobs because at that time I thought no one would hire me without a degree. (as an aside, I quickly found out how wrong I was when I actually started applying for programming jobs in late 1999 / early 2000, but that's a story for another day). Anyway, I was doing a combination of network administration (Novell Netware 4 t3h win!), desktop support, and AS/400 operations. Since networking was part of my job, and networks fundamentally fascinated me, I spend a decent amount of time reading books on TCP/IP, Ethernet, socket programming, etc. Including the classics like TCP/IP Illustrated and Internetworking with TCP/IP (there's some book recommendation after all, hah!) and eventually studied for, and passed, the Network+ certification test in late 1999. Shortly after that I got my first programming job and left all that networking engineering stuff behind. And I don't miss it, especially getting fiberglass crap all over my hands and arms while pulling ethernet cable through drop ceilings, etc. But anyway, the point is.. over the past 23 some odd years, the networking knowledge I acquired has been ridiculously valuable to me, and that value just seems to keep growing. I mean, the joke is "every system is a distributed system now" and that's actually close to true and not a joke in many cases. Nearly everything we build now involves a networking element. And when the network is broken, the system is broken. And guess what? The network breaks. A lot[1]. And knowing just enough to debug things like DNS resolution problems and what-not goes a long way. My current day-job has me doing a lot of work with AKS and Istio on Azure, and one of my "specialities" if you want to call it that, is ingress. I spend a lot of time helping teams get things set up so that traffic comes in and hits their Istio ingress gateway, whether that be by integrating with Azure App Gateway, API-M, IBM API-C, or whatever. And it's once every couple of weeks or so that I just blow somebody away with my genius (hah, haha) by doing something like editing my hosts file to selectively override a DNS value so I can test by short-cutting straight to the ingress load balancer and bypass some upstream component, or something similar. Whipping out "dig" just has them rolling in the floor. And using netstat, netcat, etc? It's like I'm doing black magic or something. The moral of this little story is that having even a fairly rudimentary knowledge of networking can go a long way. And as networks have become more and more fundamental to everything in computing, that's only become more true in my experience. So yeah, I highly recommend spending some time on this topic, regardless of which resources you choose to study. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing#The_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
purpleblue 3y ago
#1 is buy yourself a hub, NOT a switch. Consider understanding the difference between a hub vs a switch an important part of your initial networking education. Then learn how to sniff traffic, using things like WireShark, etc. You will learn a lot by watching all the traffic go back and forth, and then reference TCP/IP illustrated to understand the gist. Set up an HTTP server on a server, and then add a new computer to the network and then watch ARP, DNS, etc work their magic.
- ay 3y ago
  One can do even simpler: install a Linux host and run tcpdump / wireshark to capture its own traffic on an interface. If you time the start of capturing with the moment you connect, you can see the DHCP, and probably DAD and DHCPv6 and/or SLAAC. Then mDNS, as well as high chance for HTTP/HTTPS. Running “sudo ntpdate time.apple.com” will give you a taste of NTP. (ARP/ND will be necessarily somewhere there as well).
  - purpleblue 3y ago
    There's nothing easier than hooking up 2 computers via ethernet to an isolated hub, and then watching the traffic go back and forth. There's no additional stuff to filter, you can just look at the packets which match exactly what is shown in TCP/IP Illustrated. From there, you can expand but I think the best experience is sniffing traffic between two computers on a hub to learn the fundamentals.
    - ay 3y ago
      Two isolated computers won’t get you very far in today’s network. They might get the auto configured 169.254/16 addresses and link-local IPv6, and get some Bonjour traffic but that is about it. But those protocols are not in TCP/IP illustrated. Back in the times of IPX and NetBEUI that was indeed a useful activity - connecting two Windows 3.11 computers with NetBEUI was a nice way to learn Ethernet LLC-2 (yes, the connection-oriented Ethernet layer protocol :-) as it allowed to nicely trigger the DLSW to learn it.
- 3y ago
aos 3y ago
When I was going through this, I found it helpful to re-implement stuff in code as I was learning. I compiled resources on it in this repo for my own benefit: https://github.com/aos/computer-networking-study https://github.com/aos/computer-networking-study
ayewo 3y ago
Patterns of Network Architecture by John Day is a pretty good too if you want to learn the why of how networks are the way they are today.
hazz99 3y ago
Once you're past the fundamentals, if find yourself interested in high-performance networking, I recommend looking into userspace networking and NIC device drivers. The Intel 82599ES has a freely available (and readable!) data sheet, DPDK has a great book, fd.io has published absolutely insane benchmarks, ixy [1] has a wonderful paper and repo. It's a great way to go beyond the basics of networking and CPU performance. It's even more approachable today with XDP – you don't need to write device-specific code. [1] https://github.com/emmericp/ixy https://github.com/emmericp/ixy
- cgh 3y ago
  And on the other end of the advanced spectrum, any recommendations for learning datacenter networking? Eg similar to the topics in Cisco’s datacenter certifications: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/ccie-data-center-exam-topics https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/ccie-data-center-exam-to...
  - hazz99 3y ago
    Unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations to give, my experience starts and stops at application development. Though I would love to spend some time in a datacenter! Potentially have a look at Infiniband and Clos/fat tree networks? My more generic recommendation would be to explore semantic scholar for impactful/cited papers, look for some meta analyses, and just dig through multiple layers of references till you hit the fundamentals (typically things published in the 80s for a lot of CS topics).
austin-cheney 3y ago
https://www.ciscopress.com/ https://www.ciscopress.com/ That is generally considered the gold standard for professional network education. Yes, it’s networking according to Cisco and in some cases they do try to push some of their products as commercial solutions. However, the proprietary stuff is clearly identified by Cisco intentionally in the educational materials because the goal is education first even if you favor a competitor’s products. Cisco makes money on their educational materials and certifications so they can afford to separate their tiny bits of proprietary stuff from the education as necessary to build a strong professional labor force ready to consume their products years in the future.
ccccccc1 3y ago
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SushiHippie 3y ago
Tangential, does anyone have recommendations for understanding OSI Layer 1 and network cards?
- bradfa 3y ago
  For the physical layer, the IEEE specs are actually quite good. A lot of the IEEE 802 specifications are free in PDF format now: https://www.ieee802.org/16/arc/802-16list2/msg00142.html https://www.ieee802.org/16/arc/802-16list2/msg00142.html
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Thanks! For future reference, direct download links can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/browse/standards/get-program/page/series?id=68 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/browse/standards/get-program/pag... Found the direct link here: https://ieee802.org/ https://ieee802.org/
- 0nate 3y ago
  There are a couple of general OSI diagrams I produced recently, available here: https://www.nathanhandy.blog/articles/osi-model-revisited.html https://www.nathanhandy.blog/articles/osi-model-revisited.ht.... They might be a good conceptual starting point for you.
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Thank you, these look really beautiful! Though layer 8 seems to be missing :p

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Can anyone here comment about their experiences using ChatGPT to learn networking concepts? Are the responses accurate?

sgt 3y ago

W.Richards

The_Colonel 3y ago

I've tried in the past to read some books on the topic but failed. Too much theory, too little practice. Is there some gamified course? Perhaps literally a game? I remember playing a game where you build your CPU with NANDs, is there something like that for networking maybe?

nathan_douglas 3y ago
It's more focused on security than just networking, and I don't believe it's quite what you're looking for, but https://tryhackme.com/ https://tryhackme.com/ might be enjoyable.
mfro 3y ago
Not sure if there are any genuine games for the subject, but HackTheBox (labs and academy) have some very fun challenges that will force you to learn a decent bit about networking along the way. I personally feel I learn the most about networking messing around with a homelab, VMs or GNS3/Packet Tracer. Try and get a DHCP server setup, then connect clients, then subnet, then give it some vulnerabilities and find a reason to sniff traffic with wireshark. Each layer and protocol is its own beast so there's a lot to learn, I find it best to immerse in it all and understand how they interconnect.

mwn 3y ago

I use Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach for my classes on computer networks and distributed systems and on a theoretical level its a good read. My students appreciate the visual presentations. Modern networking setups depend a lot on the area of scope. Do you want to understand IP networks, tier-1 internet backbone, mobile networks, private networks, data center architecture, distributed web applications, etc.

thesurlydev 3y ago

Julia Evans has some good zines as a starting point and does a great job of distilling complexity and making topics like this approachable to newcomers. [1] I'd also recommend "Network Basics for Hackers" by OccupytheWeb [2] [1] https://wizardzines.com/ https://wizardzines.com/ [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BS3GZ1R9 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BS3GZ1R9

megraf 3y ago

Network hobbyist here: an excellent home project is to setup your own PBX. Complete with VLAN's, and backups running on your favorite HV. Most importantly, use hard phones with SCCP. It's a challenge of itself, and will force you to demonstrate your understanding

zdw 3y ago

https://systemsapproach.org/books/ https://systemsapproach.org/books/ Bruce and Larry's 6th edition of Computer Networking: A Systems Approach is free to read online, or you can buy a copy. Both have a long list of achievements in the networking space. Recently they've been publishing smaller more focused books on many topics. (full disclosure, I helped write the Edge Cloud OPs one)

ayewo 3y ago
5 years ago, the authors put an older edition of the book (5.4?) as a free download from GitHub: https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/tree/format/published https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/tree/format/publishe... Direct link to an older PDF: https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/blob/format/published/book.pdf https://github.com/SystemsApproach/book/blob/format/publishe...

nailer 3y ago

You (and everyone else on HN) want The Illustrated Network. https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Network-How-Works-Modern/dp/0128110279 https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Network-How-Works-Modern/... The previous best book was TCPIP Illustrated. The author of Illustrated Network was a fan of TCPIP Illustrated and wrote their book as a modern equivalent. Excerpt: https://wgoralski.com//wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Illustrated-Network-2nd-edition-Chapter-4.pdf https://wgoralski.com//wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Illustrate...

rramadass 3y ago

There is tons to study here but you have to get your fundamentals right else you will completely get overwhelmed/confused by the cacophony of jargon/acronyms/devices. The following lay the foundations; 1. An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking : ATM Networks, the Internet, and the Telephone Network by S.Keshav 2. Foundations of Modern Networking: SDN, NFV, QoE, IoT, and Cloud by William Stallings. 3. The TCP/IP Guide by Charles Kozierok - http://www.tcpipguide.com/ http://www.tcpipguide.com/ 4. Hands-On Network Programming with C: Learn socket programming in C and write secure and optimized network code by Lewis Van Winkle. 5. The All-New Switch Book: The Complete Guide to LAN Switching Technology by Rich Seifert and James Edwards. To get an idea of the overall Internet Architecture/Layouts, i also recommend the following two old books to get the background information. Things have changed a lot now but are almost always built/modified on the bedrock described here. a. Internet System Handbook by David Lynch and Marshall Rose. b. Internet Architectures by Daniel Minoli and Andrew Schmidt. Finally, you should look at all the configuration parameters of your home router (wan+lan+wifi), go through their documentation/google as necessary and make sure you understand what they are and how they are used. This is where the theory read from the above books meets practice in the real world.

krick 3y ago

It doesn't cover everything, but I liked "High Performance Browser Networking" by Ilya Grigorik. It was very straightforward, and focused on what's relevant today in the browser. However, that "today" was 11 years ago already (huh, time flies) and didn't cover what's relevant in 2024, like practical issues of dealing with CDN. Also, it really was browser-focused, so there wasn't anything on how VPNs work and such.

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

CCNA books I had classes using those. Not a programmer. Guess u dont learn CCNA in CS degree?

zerkten 3y ago
It doesn't seem to be that consistent, at least in the US. In the UK about 20 years ago it seemed that most universities had a networking course that would at least get someone to the point of being able to converse with a CCNA even if they went into much more academic detail. My uni ran optional UNIX-titled courses outside of the degree to ensure staff and students had access to some practical training. It touched on Linux networking too. I'm now in the US and I find I'm horrified at the level of networking knowledge, but occasionally impressed at the level of knowledge on other topics. It's no consistent set of topics because there seems to much more flexibility. The UK is fairly rigid with electives.

dogman144 3y ago

A good progression I think is these books in order and 2 labs: - Kurose, Computer Networks a top down approach - tcp/ip illustrated volume 1 - the no starch tcp/ip book For labs, - at your workplace or homelab, I’d click through the network configs in your cloud. This hits maybe on “modern networking,” although the theories in the books will match to what you see in cloud just maybe with cloud product names. Reading through terraform repos is also good - GNS3 lab software to build networks you read about in those books. Or tbh, just doing a net+ cert would get you in a good place for basic competency to augment a dev job. Top of mind - there is a logic to it and it’s quite interesting technology. Learn to thing in terms of protocols and their rules and it’ll open up.

jonesdc 3y ago

Would you all have any book (or YouTube) suggestions for an absolute beginner to learn from?

plexman 3y ago
keith barker is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AX9LandYJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AX9LandYJU this is the beginner track form cisco https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/article/200-301-ccna-study-materials https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/article/200-301-ccna-stu... this book is still great `CCNA - Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide (6th, 07) by Lammle, Todd`

ary 3y ago

Adding to the already good recommendations on this thread: - Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols (https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Internetworking-Protocols/dp/0201634481/ https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Int...) It covers a broader range of topics than some of the other books mentioned here and helps with an understanding of where existing tech comes from and why. Also it covers topics that you don't necessarily need to know if you're only operating in a cloud environment, but that help to understand what is going on in those far off data centers.

dayofthedaleks 3y ago
This book is so great. The author _invented Spanning Tree_ and it's still a great foundational text along with Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated vols 1&2. Hardcopies of all 3 are dirt cheap and eternally valuable for the endpaper diagrams while inspecting packet captures alone.

redleader55 3y ago

It's not exactly what you asked for, but if you're interested in the low level, algorithmic part, I recommend "Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures".

chrisweekly 3y ago

High-Performance Browser Networking -- https://hpbn.co https://hpbn.co -- is a great book and website.

scrps 3y ago

It doesn't qualify as a book but reading RFCs has always been my go to if I want to understand a protocol albeit RFCs can be a bit... Dry. https://www.rfc-editor.org/ https://www.rfc-editor.org/

emmanueloga_ 3y ago

How about https://zguide.zeromq.org/ https://zguide.zeromq.org/ ? I have seen people recommend this dearly but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

sciencesama 3y ago

there are a lot of things that are at play here, networking has been a commoditised and defragmented place even now, there is a tug of war that is always happening between companies who want to commoditise like cisco and junipers who emphasise a lot on the hardware and less on software, there is no proper gui for cisco or juniper products till now. and there is linux networking with tun and tap. one good book is to look at automation of networking (Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer) which does a good job on the history and is a latest book which goes over a wide variety of places where networking can change. if you delve into kubernetes and virtual networking it is a beast on its own !! so for modern networking just do a lab and do a packet capture and you are good to go ! learning basics gets you no where ! it is like reading how alphabets are formed but never gets you write a poem, use chatgpt when you have a doubt and move on to next topic. topics you need to look at are ipaddressing, bgp, vxlan, iptables thats it !

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rramadass 3y ago

This might be what you are looking for; The Illustrated Network: How TCP/IP Works in a Modern Network by Walter Goralski. Take a good look at the ToC, covers a lot of different aspects of a "Modern Network". Start with this and then follow up with other detailed books some of which are mentioned in my other comment in this thread.

NukedOne 3y ago

When it comes to the networking theory, you can't go wrong with Andy Tanenbaum's book.

genmud 3y ago

I'm still a fan of TCP/IP illustrated (book 1) [1] for understanding the fundamentals. The one from No Starch Press [2] is also a great book. Personally, I think if you understand the fundamentals, you will quickly realize things like software defined networks and CDN technologies are just abstractions on top of other stuff. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wesley-Professional-dp-0321336313/dp/0321336313/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wes... [2] - https://nostarch.com/tcpip.htm https://nostarch.com/tcpip.htm

rsync 3y ago
"I'm still a fan of TCP/IP illustrated (book 1) [1] for understanding the fundamentals." Agreed. I find it difficult to gratuitously study a broad topic and instead prefer to learn by building and doing. However, that book was one of the most readable, well paced and well presented books and it really did give me a good broad understanding that I rely on even now, 25 years later. Even if you think a book just about TCP/IP is pigeonholing you and you'd like a broader picture of "computer networking" I would still start with this - the design decisions and solutions described can be applied very broadly. A good example of this is the discussion of exponential backoff algorithms ... that's useful everywhere.
justtinker 3y ago
Warning about old books. (The NoStarch one is from 2005) Given that IPv4 Evolved a lot over the last 20 years to manage the complexity of address assignment and shortages, everyone should be aware that IPV6 has changed too. The chapter on IPv6 just barely hint and the development of IPv6 in real world cases. Don't take an almost 20 year old book for gospel for IPv4 or IPv6. Policy and implementation practice has changed enormously. Look at documentation from the last few years and from good sources. EG Apnic is the Regional Internet Registry for Asia. https://blog.apnic.net/2023/04/04/ipv6-architecture-and-subnetting-guide-for-network-engineers-and-operators/ https://blog.apnic.net/2023/04/04/ipv6-architecture-and-subn... Also a good source of info and opinions is the Packet Pusher set of podcasts. https://packetpushers.net/ https://packetpushers.net/ I find that they tend to have a very real world explanation of topics covered and they avoid the "I've doing networking for 20 years. Don't tell I have to change" attitude.

p1esk 3y ago

Classical topics haven't changed, just work through the Stevens book again to refresh your memory. For "modern" topics you have to be more specific - what exactly do you want to know?

smashed 3y ago

Good on you for wanting to learn about it. Two things strike me as odd about networking compared to many other IT/software fields: First, it evolves much, much slower than anything else. Everything I learned 2 or even 3 decades ago is still relevant. Ethernet, DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP. New things got bolted on but everything old is still relevant. Yes, even in the modern cloud. Second, I've met so few in the fields that actually understand anything about networking. Even as basic as an ip address and subnet. As long as the web page loads and the data is flowing, people stop caring fast. When the network breaks, most software devs are stomped and can't even do the most basic troubleshooting. My only recommendation is to start with the absolute basic and learn from first principles. Ethernet, IPv4 (packets, IP addresses, subnets, routes), UDP, DHCP, DNS, TCP, HTTP, tunnels and VPNs, in that order. Use wireshark along the way and research everything that is unclear before going up the stack. Try to run your own router/firewall using openwrt or pfsense/opnsense.

nforgerit 3y ago
> When the network breaks, most software devs are stomped and can't even do the most basic troubleshooting. Not that I'm an expert myself, but I've seen the same patterns and concluded that to be a symptom of a set of technologies whose abstractions are leaking much less than others. It e.g. rarely happens that you have to run Wireshark and the likes to debug why an image doesn't show up in your app.
- foofie 3y ago
  I'm also not an expert, but I would wager that networking doesn't change as fast as other computing-related topics because a big chunk of it is implemented in hardware, which is very expensive to change/upgrade, and that new network elements need to be compatible and integrated into existing networks, which don't easily change because its very expensice to change/upgrade and needs to remain compatible with other networking elements.
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bvvg 3y ago

beeburrt 3y ago

I’ve been using http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/online_lectures.htm http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/online_lectures.htm which is a course by authors of Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach

Cwizard 3y ago
We used this book in my university class on networking. I can also recommend it.
mvcatsifma 3y ago
Seconded; I also recommend this book.

teleforce 3y ago

For me Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach (CNTDA) by Kurose is still the best textbook out there to learn modern networking: https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/index.php https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/index.php Starting with the 6th edition, it has separated control and forwarding planes for the network layer to reflect the increasing popularity of software-defined networking (SDN) i.e. evolution of hardware centric to software centric networking. The fact that even before 6th edition when the chapter on networking is still monolithic (combined chapter on control and forwarding), it has already mentioned about the separation concerns between the control and forwarding planes while other popular textbooks still not highlighting this important matter. In addition, unlike many textbooks you can download all the supporting materials slides, exercises, animation, etc, of the from the authors' public website and Prof. Kurose video lectures are also available in Youtube. My main wish lists for the next edition (9th) hopefully include Smart-NIC for modern approach to in-network computation and also the newly standardized segment routing for network layer QoS. If there's The Nobel Prize in Literature for textbook authors, the authors of this book should be more than deserving.

diego_sandoval 3y ago
I read the 7th edition and I agree with you. It's a great book. My wish would be for the section/mention of NAT to be expanded on and discuss NAT traversal mechanisms.
arwineap 3y ago
The licensing of this book is not something I've ever seen before... I'm unable to buy it ?
- the_only_law 3y ago
  $699 for a paperback copy. God I love textbooks.
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    Libgen exists purely for this reason. $50? Sure. $100? Eh sure why not? $700? lol.

Shane325 3y ago

High-Performance Browser Networking: https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/

luisgvv 3y ago
From time to time I find myself coming back to this one, it's short and concise. Of course if you want to go deeper this one doesn't cut the deal
adhamsalama 3y ago
A very good book for web developers. I read it a couple of months ago. It's very useful and I highly recommend it, even if it doesn't go deep into the details like other books.

cvhashim04 3y ago

Going through Hussein Nasser course right now, which is a good guide for noobs like myself.

teeray 3y ago

Books are good, but don’t underestimate the power of overcomplicated home networking as a teaching project. Pick up some gear and VLAN your network so all the IoT stuff is on its own network away from your protected devices (also make it so IoT devices can only talk to the WAN). Set up a guest network. Make it so you and guests can stream to your streaming devices but guests can’t ping your protected devices (this one is a whoooole thing involving MDNS and reflectors). Set up a site-to-site Wireguard VPN with a cloud VNet (try it without using Tailscale first). Set up a Pi-Hole, then DNAT all DNS traffic to it. Come up with a fun naming scheme for your machines (mine are all ships from The Expanse). Set up DNS nicely so you never have to remember IPs. Anyway, those are just some ideas that come to mind.

scubbo 3y ago
Having done almost all of these - I still feel like I know about 2% of how networking actually works :laugh: VPCs are just so unnecessarily complicated!
dml2135 3y ago
Ha this is me right now. I’ve got the VLAN segmentation down, but now getting casting and airplay working across VLANs with mDNS has me a bit stumped. Definitely a bit tricker than I anticipated, I thought I’d just need to write firewall rules. For me everything is named after things from Dune :)
- ta1243 3y ago
  mdns is a right pain as it uses the range for local subnet only, and has a TTL of 1, so you can't just pim route it round your network like normal multicast. You need a device which will reflect messages between all the different vlans -- avahi-daemon is popular
0xBDB 3y ago
This is a good list. To make it more modern (i.e., software defined or infrastructure as code or whatever buzzword is current) you could then do it all in Terraform, Ansible, etc. on a Proxmox / PFSense / VMWare home lab. Maybe even add GitOps - e.g. install a GitHub Actions agent locally and have it run the Terraform etc. against your lab servers automatically when you commit it.

corethree 3y ago

Are there any books or resources to learn troubleshooting, debugging with linux networking. Like I can read the books and know the theory, but deploying the theory in reality needs a lot of intuition that can only be gained through experience. That's what all the training materials are missing. I want to fast track this section with practical practice problems.

lanstin 3y ago
Meet people and solve their network problems. Whether at work or family or where ever, any time you solve a tricky problem you learn more and people bring you more in the future, plus you helped them which is a nice feeling. Also like they said above, build yourself a wonderfully complex home or small office network and maintain it. I would also say smaller companies are better for learning the basics as in large companies oftentimes you won’t even know someone allowed to touch cables but in a small company one person has broader responsibility or access to cool problems.
- corethree 3y ago
  right but I want a resource that will get me from 0 to 10 much faster. Like a set of 20 problems I can troubleshoot designed to help me learn quickly. The reason why learning something likely calculus is so straight forward is because you can just do tons of problem sets and eventually you develop the instinct for it which by default comes with understanding. I want the same thing for networking. Problem sets is the key. I guess this is a start up idea.
  - DANmode 3y ago
    The port is rated for 1Gbps, but the connection speed shown on the client's Windows Machine network status is only 10Mbps. What do you do to resolve?
    - corethree 3y ago
      Give me a domain. For example right now I can use chatGPT or Google to solve which I would do in the real world. But my goal is to get familiar with tooling. I want a restricted domain, but not so restricted that I can deduce the answer.

ajoseps 3y ago

for classic network programming that's relatively hands on and has a lot of examples, beej's guide to network programming is great (and free online): https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/ https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

usrbinenv 3y ago

"Networking for Systems Administrators" by Michael W. Lucas. In retrospect, should've been called "Networking for programmers". Short. Concise. Examples for all operating systems including Windows. That will get you started. After that, to level-up, any book with good ratings would do. And you will also know which part of the networking stack you want to learn more about, thus, you'd pick the correct book for yourself. But this one is a must have if you're feeling very uncertain about your understanding of networking concepts and how everything glues together.

BarbaryCoast 3y ago
Wanted to bump this. It's the book I recommend when someone asks, "How can I learn networking". My next favorite is the Top-Down book everyone above mentions. I like that it starts with loading a web page, instead of bits on a wire. And they have pcap files so you don't even need a lab. The Stevens book is the standard text for programmers writing network code. Beej's Guide (https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/ https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/) Is how I learned. By the time you get here, you'll know enough to know which book to read next.
sciencesama 3y ago
also can add this new book Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer
smitty1e 3y ago
Just arrived in the mail today, in fact. I'm turning into a bit of a fan of his stuff: https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=michael+w.+lucas https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=michael+w.+lucas

jrflowers 3y ago

How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie

uhinta 3y ago
It's great for peoples, the question is probably asked for machines.

mindcrime 3y ago

I don't really have any book recommendations for you (shocking, I know!) but I'll just offer this up by way of encouragement. I think what you're proposing to do is a great idea, and I wholeheartedly endorse having everyone (at least everyone in "the tech industry" or even tangential to it) learn at least the basics of networking. To illustrate why I say this, let me give you some back story. In the late 1990's (98 or thereabouts) I was working in IT, but not as a programmer. I still had not finished my C.S. degree, and I wasn't applying for any programming jobs because at that time I thought no one would hire me without a degree. (as an aside, I quickly found out how wrong I was when I actually started applying for programming jobs in late 1999 / early 2000, but that's a story for another day). Anyway, I was doing a combination of network administration (Novell Netware 4 t3h win!), desktop support, and AS/400 operations. Since networking was part of my job, and networks fundamentally fascinated me, I spend a decent amount of time reading books on TCP/IP, Ethernet, socket programming, etc. Including the classics like TCP/IP Illustrated and Internetworking with TCP/IP (there's some book recommendation after all, hah!) and eventually studied for, and passed, the Network+ certification test in late 1999. Shortly after that I got my first programming job and left all that networking engineering stuff behind. And I don't miss it, especially getting fiberglass crap all over my hands and arms while pulling ethernet cable through drop ceilings, etc. But anyway, the point is.. over the past 23 some odd years, the networking knowledge I acquired has been ridiculously valuable to me, and that value just seems to keep growing. I mean, the joke is "every system is a distributed system now" and that's actually close to true and not a joke in many cases. Nearly everything we build now involves a networking element. And when the network is broken, the system is broken. And guess what? The network breaks. A lot[1]. And knowing just enough to debug things like DNS resolution problems and what-not goes a long way. My current day-job has me doing a lot of work with AKS and Istio on Azure, and one of my "specialities" if you want to call it that, is ingress. I spend a lot of time helping teams get things set up so that traffic comes in and hits their Istio ingress gateway, whether that be by integrating with Azure App Gateway, API-M, IBM API-C, or whatever. And it's once every couple of weeks or so that I just blow somebody away with my genius (hah, haha) by doing something like editing my hosts file to selectively override a DNS value so I can test by short-cutting straight to the ingress load balancer and bypass some upstream component, or something similar. Whipping out "dig" just has them rolling in the floor. And using netstat, netcat, etc? It's like I'm doing black magic or something. The moral of this little story is that having even a fairly rudimentary knowledge of networking can go a long way. And as networks have become more and more fundamental to everything in computing, that's only become more true in my experience. So yeah, I highly recommend spending some time on this topic, regardless of which resources you choose to study. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing#The_fallacies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...

purpleblue 3y ago

#1 is buy yourself a hub, NOT a switch. Consider understanding the difference between a hub vs a switch an important part of your initial networking education. Then learn how to sniff traffic, using things like WireShark, etc. You will learn a lot by watching all the traffic go back and forth, and then reference TCP/IP illustrated to understand the gist. Set up an HTTP server on a server, and then add a new computer to the network and then watch ARP, DNS, etc work their magic.

ay 3y ago
One can do even simpler: install a Linux host and run tcpdump / wireshark to capture its own traffic on an interface. If you time the start of capturing with the moment you connect, you can see the DHCP, and probably DAD and DHCPv6 and/or SLAAC. Then mDNS, as well as high chance for HTTP/HTTPS. Running “sudo ntpdate time.apple.com” will give you a taste of NTP. (ARP/ND will be necessarily somewhere there as well).
- purpleblue 3y ago
  There's nothing easier than hooking up 2 computers via ethernet to an isolated hub, and then watching the traffic go back and forth. There's no additional stuff to filter, you can just look at the packets which match exactly what is shown in TCP/IP Illustrated. From there, you can expand but I think the best experience is sniffing traffic between two computers on a hub to learn the fundamentals.
  - ay 3y ago
    Two isolated computers won’t get you very far in today’s network. They might get the auto configured 169.254/16 addresses and link-local IPv6, and get some Bonjour traffic but that is about it. But those protocols are not in TCP/IP illustrated. Back in the times of IPX and NetBEUI that was indeed a useful activity - connecting two Windows 3.11 computers with NetBEUI was a nice way to learn Ethernet LLC-2 (yes, the connection-oriented Ethernet layer protocol :-) as it allowed to nicely trigger the DLSW to learn it.
3y ago

aos 3y ago

When I was going through this, I found it helpful to re-implement stuff in code as I was learning. I compiled resources on it in this repo for my own benefit: https://github.com/aos/computer-networking-study https://github.com/aos/computer-networking-study

ayewo 3y ago

Patterns of Network Architecture by John Day is a pretty good too if you want to learn the why of how networks are the way they are today.

hazz99 3y ago

Once you're past the fundamentals, if find yourself interested in high-performance networking, I recommend looking into userspace networking and NIC device drivers. The Intel 82599ES has a freely available (and readable!) data sheet, DPDK has a great book, fd.io has published absolutely insane benchmarks, ixy [1] has a wonderful paper and repo. It's a great way to go beyond the basics of networking and CPU performance. It's even more approachable today with XDP – you don't need to write device-specific code. [1] https://github.com/emmericp/ixy https://github.com/emmericp/ixy

cgh 3y ago
And on the other end of the advanced spectrum, any recommendations for learning datacenter networking? Eg similar to the topics in Cisco’s datacenter certifications: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/ccie-data-center-exam-topics https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/ccie-data-center-exam-to...
- hazz99 3y ago
  Unfortunately I don’t have any recommendations to give, my experience starts and stops at application development. Though I would love to spend some time in a datacenter! Potentially have a look at Infiniband and Clos/fat tree networks? My more generic recommendation would be to explore semantic scholar for impactful/cited papers, look for some meta analyses, and just dig through multiple layers of references till you hit the fundamentals (typically things published in the 80s for a lot of CS topics).

austin-cheney 3y ago

https://www.ciscopress.com/ https://www.ciscopress.com/ That is generally considered the gold standard for professional network education. Yes, it’s networking according to Cisco and in some cases they do try to push some of their products as commercial solutions. However, the proprietary stuff is clearly identified by Cisco intentionally in the educational materials because the goal is education first even if you favor a competitor’s products. Cisco makes money on their educational materials and certifications so they can afford to separate their tiny bits of proprietary stuff from the education as necessary to build a strong professional labor force ready to consume their products years in the future.

ccccccc1 3y ago

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SushiHippie 3y ago

Tangential, does anyone have recommendations for understanding OSI Layer 1 and network cards?

bradfa 3y ago
For the physical layer, the IEEE specs are actually quite good. A lot of the IEEE 802 specifications are free in PDF format now: https://www.ieee802.org/16/arc/802-16list2/msg00142.html https://www.ieee802.org/16/arc/802-16list2/msg00142.html
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Thanks! For future reference, direct download links can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/browse/standards/get-program/page/series?id=68 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/browse/standards/get-program/pag... Found the direct link here: https://ieee802.org/ https://ieee802.org/
0nate 3y ago
There are a couple of general OSI diagrams I produced recently, available here: https://www.nathanhandy.blog/articles/osi-model-revisited.html https://www.nathanhandy.blog/articles/osi-model-revisited.ht.... They might be a good conceptual starting point for you.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Thank you, these look really beautiful! Though layer 8 seems to be missing :p