Networking Fundamentals

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I firmly believe that you cannot be a good networking engineer¹ without a firm grasp of the networking fundamentals, and I couldn’t resist pointing that out a few times (see also certifications-related posts):

Regardless of how far down this page you’ll get, these blog posts are a must-read:

I would also suggest exploring these series of blog posts as well as textbooks and other resources I collected:

The rest of the fundamentals-related blog posts are collected on this page.

Network Addressing

Addresses and routes are the basic concepts anyone dealing with a network must (eventually) grasp. These blog posts describe how we got a hierarchy of addresses:

I also compared the device addresses (used in OSI) and interface addresses (used in TCP/IP):

Bridging, Routing, and Switching

There is a single reason we build computer networks (apart from job security): we want them to transport data between the attached endpoints. These blog posts describe some of the interesting details:

Deep Dives

These blog posts dive deeper into interesting topics:

If you like them, it’s probably time you start exploring the deep-dive series I already mentioned.

A Bit of a History

These blog posts might help you figure out some less obvious details or give you a historical perspective on why networking technologies evolved to where we are right now:

If you want to dive deeper into historical technologies, you might enjoy the comparison of TCP/IP and OSI (CLNP) protocol stacks:

There Be Rants

Long-time readers know I can’t resist a good rant:

Everything Is a Graph

You can represent every network as a graph of network devices (nodes) and links². Rachel Traylor covered the graph theory in the (free) Network Connectivity, Graph Theory, and Reliable Network Design and Graph Algorithms in Networks webinars; these blog posts might provide some extra details: