Warning about old books. (The NoStarch one is from 2005)

Given that IPv4 Evolved a lot over the last 20 years to manage the complexity of address assignment and shortages, everyone should be aware that IPV6 has changed too.

The chapter on IPv6 just barely hint and the development of IPv6 in real world cases.

Don't take an almost 20 year old book for gospel for IPv4 or IPv6.

Policy and implementation practice has changed enormously. Look at documentation from the last few years and from good sources. EG Apnic is the Regional Internet Registry for Asia. https://blog.apnic.net/2023/04/04/ipv6-architecture-and-subn...

Also a good source of info and opinions is the Packet Pusher set of podcasts. https://packetpushers.net/

I find that they tend to have a very real world explanation of topics covered and they avoid the "I've doing networking for 20 years. Don't tell I have to change" attitude.

What are you talking about? TCP/IP hasn't changed in the last 20 years... like, at all.

There might be best practices which have changed around NAT, software defined networking and load balancing, but it's all on top of existing protocols.

If you are talking about subnetting practices, it has always been an operational thing... that's not what these books are talking about.

Looking at the No Starch Press book: 1616 pages and 88 chapters. Something tells me that I don't know TCP/IP as well as I thought I did...

It’s meant as a reference book.

You need to know some factoid, you look it up, you actually find it because it’s 1600 pages long.

These days, most people would Google it. This book was written back in 2005 and some of us still prefer paper for reference.

FYI about 'factoid':

> The term was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

That book's a reference encyclopedia, not an intro/primer.

"I'm still a fan of TCP/IP illustrated (book 1) [1] for understanding the fundamentals."

Agreed.

I find it difficult to gratuitously study a broad topic and instead prefer to learn by building and doing.

However, that book was one of the most readable, well paced and well presented books and it really did give me a good broad understanding that I rely on even now, 25 years later.

Even if you think a book just about TCP/IP is pigeonholing you and you'd like a broader picture of "computer networking" I would still start with this - the design decisions and solutions described can be applied very broadly.

A good example of this is the discussion of exponential backoff algorithms ... that's useful everywhere.

TCP Illustrated volume 1 and Unix Network Programming volume 1, 3rd edition.

And then just read RFC for more modern stuff like QUIC, WebSockets, WebRTC, etc.

I should add:

Don't be afraid to dive into RFCs. They're the primary source, and once you've got the basics (from eg. TCP Illustrated) understood, they're easy to read and understand.

In many cases, I find them to be better than the majority of books/articles/videos.

I'll add onto what you said: if you're afraid of RFCs, look for a Wikipedia page of that topic. They're generally much more readable and have diagrams.

For example, trying to learn the TCP fields from the RFCs alone is hard because of how many there are. Starting with the Wikipedia page on TCP and then following the linked RFCs is easier.

You can't NOT have these books on your bookshelf, if you are serious about diving deeply into TCP/IP.