Part 0 — Start here
0.1 Who this is for
| You are… | This guide fits? |
|---|---|
| New to networking, want the whole picture in one sitting | Yes — start at Chapter 1, read in order |
A backend/frontend engineer who's never traced a request past fetch() |
Yes — Parts 3, 5, and 6 are your highest-value reading |
| Preparing for a systems-design interview | Yes — the "Putting It All Together" sections in Chapters 7 and the flow diagram in 0.3 are exactly what gets asked |
| A network engineer who already knows TCP/BGP cold | Skim Parts 1–4, focus on Parts 5–7 (proxies, CDNs, rendering, security) |
| Looking for hands-on labs and exercises | See the companion networking/tcp-ip/real-life-guide-v1.md in this wiki — it's built around Practice sections and a home lab |
This guide is deliberately conceptual and reference-style: every chapter explains a mechanism precisely and shows what it looks like on the wire, but it doesn't carry a single running lab project across chapters the way some other guides in this wiki do. If you want that, read this guide first for the mental model, then do the hands-on guide.