Part 14 — Where to go next
You've reached the end of the core material. Parts 1–12 took you from "what problem does a network solve" to reading packet captures, diagnosing real failures, and understanding BGP and OSPF — the full arc this guide set out to teach. This last part is a checkpoint: what you can genuinely do now, what's honestly still missing, and where to point that six-month plan you've been meaning to make.
Chapter 63 — Honest gaps and a six-month plan
What you can now do
- Explain the whole path from URL to pixels
- Subnet confidently
- Read packet captures
- Diagnose the five classic failure modes systematically
- Understand why things are slow, not just that they are
That is more than many working developers and support engineers know.
Honest gaps this guide left
| Gap | Where to fill it |
|---|---|
| Routing protocol configuration (Part 12 covers the concepts, not the CLI) | CCNA material; Routing TCP/IP (Doyle); FRRouting docs |
| Switching in depth (STP, VLANs, trunking, port security) | CCNA; Network Warrior |
| Email protocols (SMTP flow, STARTTLS, SPF/DKIM/DMARC) | Postfix: The Definitive Guide; the DMARC.org guides |
| Physical layer (cabling, fibre types, SFPs, PoE) | CompTIA Network+; vendor cabling guides |
| Multicast (IGMP, PIM) and MPLS/VRF | CCNP material; Routing TCP/IP, Vol 2 |
| IPsec internals (IKE, SAs, tunnel vs transport) | IPsec VPN Design; your firewall vendor's docs |
| Wireless in depth (RF, channels, roaming, 802.1X) | 802.11 Wireless Networks (Gast); CWNA |
| Network security in depth | Security+; Practical Packet Analysis; OWASP |
| Cloud networking in depth | Your provider's docs and certification |
| Automation (Ansible, Python for networks, NetBox) | Network Programmability and Automation (O'Reilly) |
| Theory and maths (queueing, algorithms) | Kurose & Ross; Peterson & Davie |
| Voice/video, QoS, SIP | Specialist material once you need it |
A six-month plan
MONTH 1-2 : CEMENT THE FUNDAMENTALS
* Re-read Parts 3, 5, and 6 of this guide -- they'll read differently now
* Work through Kurose & Ross chapters 1-5 (or the free lectures)
* Do 50 subnetting problems until it's boring
Deliverable: a network diagram of your home/office with every address explained
MONTH 3 : PACKETS
* Read "Practical Packet Analysis" (Chris Sanders) cover to cover
* Analyse one capture per day: your own traffic, then the Wireshark samples
Deliverable: a personal Wireshark cheat sheet and 5 annotated captures
MONTH 4 : BUILD A LAB
* Two or three VMs (or containers, or a Raspberry Pi)
* Configure: static addresses, routing between subnets, a firewall, DHCP, DNS
* Break each piece deliberately and fix it
Deliverable: a working multi-subnet lab you built from nothing
MONTH 5 : GO WIDE OR DEEP -- choose ONE
(a) Certification -- CompTIA Network+ then CCNA (structured, employable)
(b) Systems/SRE -- Linux networking, containers, Kubernetes networking
(c) Security -- Security+, packet forensics, TryHackMe
(d) Performance -- HPBN, tuning, BBR, load testing
Deliverable: a certification, or a written project
MONTH 6 : TEACH IT
* Write up something you found hard (subnetting? MTU? TIME_WAIT?)
* Answer questions on r/networking or Server Fault
Deliverable: a published article
The best habit: whenever something on a network confuses you, capture it.
Twenty minutes with tcpdump teaches more than an hour of searching.