Once you got that you will have a way simpler time to understand netmasks and similar and calculate IP ranges etc. it's just a 32bit integer (in ipv4; 64bit wit

Once you got that you will have a way simpler time to understand netmasks and similar and calculate IP ranges etc. it's just a 32bit integer (in ipv4; 64bit with ipv6) and the dots separate the individual bytes to give a "human friendly" representation.