0.3 The roadmap
Three routes. All use the same chapters.
Route A — "I want to understand how the internet works" (2 weeks, reading + light practice, ~1 h/day)
| Day | Read | You'll be able to |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Part 0, Part 1 | Describe the layer model and the URL journey |
| 2 | Ch 5–8 | Explain MAC addresses, ARP, switches |
| 3–4 | Ch 9–11 | Read any IP/mask and do subnetting |
| 5 | Ch 12–14 | NAT, routing, ping/traceroute |
| 6 | Ch 15–16 | MTU, IPv6 |
| 7 | Ch 17–18 | DHCP and DNS |
| 8 | Ch 19–20 | Ports, sockets, UDP |
| 9–10 | Ch 21–23 | TCP end to end |
| 11 | Ch 24–27 | Why connections are slow |
| 12 | Ch 28–30 | HTTP, TLS, HTTP/3 |
| 13 | Ch 31–33 | tcpdump, Wireshark, ss |
| 14 | Ch 34–35 | Troubleshoot like a professional |
Route B — "I need this for my job" (6 weeks, ~1–2 h/day)
Weeks 1–2: Route A, doing every Practice section. Week 3: Part 8 (tools) + capture your own traffic daily. Week 4: Part 3 again, deeply — subnet a real network on paper; Project 1. Week 5: Part 5–6 again — capture and annotate a full TCP connection; Project 2. Week 6: Part 9 + Project 3 (break something on purpose and diagnose it).
Route C — "I want to go deep / change careers" (12 weeks, ~2 h/day)
| Week | Focus | Deliverable |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Part 0–1 + tools installed | notes.md started, first capture taken |
| 2 | Part 2 (link layer) | Annotated capture of ARP + an Ethernet frame |
| 3 | Ch 9–11 | 30 subnetting problems solved correctly, on paper |
| 4 | Ch 12–16 | A network diagram of your own home/office network |
| 5 | Ch 17–18 | A full DNS resolution traced with dig +trace |
| 6 | Ch 19–23 | A packet-by-packet writeup of one TCP connection |
| 7 | Ch 24–27 | A measured throughput/latency experiment with tc |
| 8 | Ch 28–30 | A TLS handshake decoded in Wireshark |
| 9 | Ch 31–33 | Your own tcpdump/Wireshark cheat sheet |
| 10 | Ch 34–35 | Diagnose 5 deliberately-broken scenarios |
| 11 | Ch 36–38 | Build a small lab (containers/VMs) with routing between them |
| 12 | Consolidate | A blog post teaching one topic; read the companion guide |
Then: CompTIA Network+ or CCNA if you want the credential, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach for theory, and the RFCs for the truth.
Beyond all three routes: each is time-boxed and stops around Part 8 or 9. Parts 10–13 continue the same material at the same depth whenever you have more time — HTTP internals (caching, cookies, CORS, streaming), monitoring at scale, how routers actually learn routes (OSPF/BGP), and the guide's own honest wrap-up. Nothing about them requires a fixed schedule; read them chapter by chapter as the topic becomes relevant to what you're working on.