Networking from Zero — A Beginner's Guide to TCP/IP (v1)

Contents

91 chapters, one page each. Prefer one long page? Read the whole book on one page.

1. What you will be able to do at the end1 min
2. Contents3 min
3. Part 0 — Start here: how to use this guide
4. 0.1 Who this guide is for1 min
5. 0.2 The learning flow (use this for every chapter)2 min
6. 0.3 The roadmap2 min
7. 0.4 Set up your machine (20 minutes)2 min
8. 0.5 The tiny bit of background you need2 min
9. 0.6 How to not get stuck1 min
10. 0.7 The series: OS → networking → security → HTTPS2 min
11. 0.8 The Go labs: build the network tools yourself3 min
12. Part 1 — What is a network, really?
13. Chapter 1 — The problem networks solve3 min
14. Chapter 2 — Layers: the postal-service idea3 min
15. Chapter 3 — The four layers of TCP/IP5 min
16. Chapter 4 — Our running example: what happens when you open a website5 min
17. Part 2 — Your local network (the link layer)
18. Chapter 5 — MAC addresses and Ethernet frames4 min
19. Chapter 6 — ARP: finding your neighbour4 min
20. Chapter 7 — Switches, and what "broadcast domain" means4 min
21. Chapter 8 — Wi-Fi: same idea, different physics4 min
22. Part 3 — IP addresses and getting around the world
23. Chapter 9 — What an IP address actually is4 min
24. Chapter 10 — Subnet masks: the part everyone finds hard10 min
25. Chapter 11 — Subnetting practice: designing a real network4 min
26. Chapter 12 — Private addresses and NAT6 min
27. Chapter 13 — Routing: how a packet finds its way4 min
28. Chapter 14 — ICMP: what ping and traceroute really do5 min
29. Chapter 15 — MTU: the maximum size of a packet4 min
30. Chapter 16 — IPv6: why it exists and how it differs4 min
31. Part 4 — Getting connected automatically
32. Chapter 17 — DHCP: how your device gets an address4 min
33. Chapter 18 — DNS: turning names into addresses12 min
34. Part 5 — Ports and the transport layer
35. Chapter 19 — Ports and sockets: which program gets the data?8 min
36. Chapter 20 — UDP: fire and forget8 min
37. Chapter 21 — TCP part 1: the three-way handshake7 min
38. Chapter 22 — TCP part 2: how it never loses your data7 min
39. Chapter 23 — TCP part 3: closing a connection, and the states7 min
40. Part 6 — Making TCP fast (and why yours isn't)
41. Chapter 24 — Flow control: the sliding window6 min
42. Chapter 25 — Congestion control: sharing the road5 min
43. Chapter 26 — The 40-millisecond mystery5 min
44. Chapter 27 — Latency, bandwidth, and bufferbloat4 min
45. Part 7 — The application layer
46. Chapter 28 — HTTP: how the web actually talks9 min
47. Chapter 29 — TLS: how it gets encrypted9 min
48. Chapter 30 — HTTP/2 and HTTP/34 min
49. Part 8 — Seeing and fixing the network
50. Chapter 31 — tcpdump : watching packets go by4 min
51. Chapter 32 — Wireshark: reading a conversation11 min
52. Chapter 33 — ss : what your machine's connections are doing7 min
53. Chapter 34 — A troubleshooting method that works8 min
54. Chapter 35 — The five classic problems and their fingerprints3 min
55. Part 9 — Modern networking
56. Chapter 36 — Load balancers, CDNs, and anycast2 min
57. Chapter 37 — Cloud and container networking2 min
58. Chapter 38 — Security basics3 min
59. Part 10 — HTTP in depth
60. Chapter 39 — How HTTP messages are framed (and how it goes wrong)3 min
61. Chapter 40 — Caching: the biggest performance lever there is4 min
62. Chapter 41 — Cookies: how the web remembers you3 min
63. Chapter 42 — CORS: why the browser blocked your request3 min
64. Chapter 43 — WebSockets and Server-Sent Events4 min
65. Chapter 44 — Compression, range requests, and proxies3 min
66. Part 11 — Watching your network (monitoring)
67. Chapter 45 — What to measure, and why averages lie3 min
68. Chapter 46 — Where the numbers come from: counters, flows, and probes7 min
69. Chapter 47 — Alerts that wake you for the right reasons4 min
70. Part 12 — How routers learn routes
71. Chapter 48 — Two ways to share directions3 min
72. Chapter 49 — OSPF: finding your way inside one network3 min
73. Chapter 50 — BGP: how the whole internet agrees on directions4 min
74. Chapter 51 — When a router dies: VRRP and friends3 min
75. Part 13 — Professional networking: operations, debugging, and design
76. Chapter 52 — Host networking internals: namespaces, veth, bridges, conntrack7 min
77. Chapter 53 — Firewalls in the real world: host firewalls, cloud security groups, NACLs8 min
78. Chapter 54 — VPNs and tunnels: WireGuard, IPsec, GRE, overlays, and MTU traps6 min
79. Chapter 55 — DNS operations: authoritative DNS, delegation, split-horizon, outages7 min
80. Chapter 56 — TLS and certificate operations: expiry, chains, SNI, rotation6 min
81. Chapter 57 — Production load balancing: L4 vs L7, health checks, draining, retries11 min
82. Chapter 58 — Kubernetes networking: Services, Ingress, NetworkPolicy, CNI6 min
83. Chapter 59 — Network performance engineering: QoS, packet loss, shaping, saturation7 min
84. Chapter 60 — Incident response: runbooks, packet evidence, and escalation4 min
85. Chapter 61 — Network design/refactoring: migrations, diagrams, IPAM, change safety4 min
86. Chapter 62 — Capstone lab: build, break, observe, and repair a production-like network2 min
87. Part 14 — Where to go next
88. Chapter 63 — Honest gaps and a six-month plan2 min
89. Chapter 64 — Project ideas by level2 min
90. Chapter 65 — The series map: where every topic lives2 min
91. Continue the series1 min
92. Appendix A — Glossary (plain language)
93. Appendix B — Command cheat sheet
94. Appendix C — Subnetting cheat sheet and answers
95. The table to memorise1 min
96. Chapter 10, Set A — answers1 min
97. Chapter 10, Set B — answers1 min
98. Chapter 11 — answers1 min
99. Appendix D — Ports and protocols reference
100. Ports worth recognising1 min
101. Protocol numbers (in the IP header)1 min
102. ICMP types worth knowing1 min
103. Address ranges1 min
104. Appendix E — Reading list and fact-checking notes
105. If you only do five things1 min
106. Books1 min
107. Free video courses1 min
108. Blogs and sites1 min
109. Hands-on practice1 min
110. Specifications (for when you want the truth)1 min
111. How the facts in this guide were checked1 min
112. Appendix F — Answers to "Check yourself"