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Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

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Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#31

Post by Jugurtha »

stusmall wrote: post #28
unethical_ban wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it when people without deep knowledge of a subject try to learn about it and explain themselves to others.

This is an important part of the way I learn. I will read something and then explain it to someone else. It makes me think deeper about the issue as I form the words and it gives me a great chance to get corrected when I am making unfair assumptions. I always preface this conversations with "as I understand it" or "from what I read" or some other disclaimer. I used to have a coworker who would give me soooo much guff…

It's the way I learn, too.. But it doesn't make me write things as a guy who's knowledgeable.

I'm a total noob, yet the first few paragraphs made me cringe because I felt there were some odd things. I had a weird feeling about it. It wouldn't have bothered me if there wasn't this "A periodical about best practices and advanced techniques in Objective-C"..

Or using the word "great contributors", etc. I mean, one has to be humble because unless one really knows his stuff, he shouldn't talk that way.

If the writing style was more in the "I'm learning and journaling my progress", it would've been more than okay, and knowledgeable people wouldn't have a problem with it.

I was in forums and learning to design my PCB's, I'd post my design and ask for feedback, and people who'd spent 30+ years would comment on them and point flaws on what I thought was nice and would find a thousand flaws in it. And I got back to wrok, iteration after iteration.. Until these really great guys who do that for a living would say "Beautiful work".

Had I posted something like "advanced PCB design" in the "this is how it's done" way, they'd have ignored me and I would've stayed more ignorant than I still am.

There was a question on the Python mailing list asking how long it takes to say that one knows how to program. People with 40+ years actively programming said: I'll let you know when I'm there.

Humility goes a long way. Heck even when I read things on the nmap mailing list, I don't feel that tone that they consider they know more than you do even though they really, really know their stuff.

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#32

Post by maaaats »

norswap wrote: post #5

If you want to further your understanding of network protocols, there's an excellent open textbook available here: http://cnp3book.info.ucl.ac.be/

At Uni we had a book called "Computer Networking - A top down approach". One of the best teaching books I've ever read. The amount of detail is very nice balanced, and as the title says it's a top down approach where one layer at a time is discussed. Very interesting.

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#34

Post by peterwwillis »

stusmall wrote: post #28
unethical_ban wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it when people without deep knowledge of a subject try to learn about it and explain themselves to others.

This is an important part of the way I learn. I will read something and then explain it to someone else. It makes me think deeper about the issue as I form the words and it gives me a great chance to get corrected when I am making unfair assumptions. I always preface this conversations with "as I understand it" or "from what I read" or some other disclaimer. I used to have a coworker who would give me soooo much guff…

It's nice to put disclaimers in there, but if it's the first time a person has heard the information, the disclaimer is basically ignored. Because what are you going to do when you have to troubleshoot a tcp connection or write an application? Go back and find a book on tcp and learn the whole thing from the beginning? Unlikely, as you already have what you consider to be knowledge about tcp. Even if you don't consider it to be authoritative, you probably have just enough to get in trouble.

That's why I find the whole "blind leading the blind" way of teaching to be counter-productive. Not that it's really serious or anything; nobody's going to lose a leg if you screw up your tcp connection. But when extended to other more serious topics, it can be dangerous to teach things to people if you're not sure about the subject matter. For example, something as simple as jumping a car battery actually isn't simple at all (when done correctly).

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#35

Post by ohblahitsme »

Jugurtha wrote: post #31
stusmall wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important part of the way I learn. I will read something and then explain it to someone else. It makes me think deeper about the issue as I form the words and it gives me a great chance to get corrected when I am making unfair assumptions. I always preface this conversations with "as I understand it" or "from what I read" or some other disclaimer. I used to have a coworker who would give me soooo much guff…

It's the way I learn, too.. But it doesn't make me write things as a guy who's knowledgeable. I'm a total noob, yet the first few paragraphs made me cringe because I felt there were some odd things. I had a weird feeling about it. It wouldn't have bothered me if there wasn't this "A periodical about best practices and advanced techniques in Objective-C".. Or using the word "great contributors", etc. I mean, one has t…

Could you post an example of the "I'm learning and journaling my progress" writing style? I'd like to start doing this and I don't want to come off as an expert on things I'm just learning.

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#36

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

peterwwillis wrote: post #34
stusmall wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important part of the way I learn. I will read something and then explain it to someone else. It makes me think deeper about the issue as I form the words and it gives me a great chance to get corrected when I am making unfair assumptions. I always preface this conversations with "as I understand it" or "from what I read" or some other disclaimer. I used to have a coworker who would give me soooo much guff…

It's nice to put disclaimers in there, but if it's the first time a person has heard the information, the disclaimer is basically ignored. Because what are you going to do when you have to troubleshoot a tcp connection or write an application? Go back and find a book on tcp and learn the whole thing from the beginning? Unlikely, as you already have what you consider to be knowledge about tcp. Even if you don't consid…

I think there are arguments for both sides - if you do know something very well, you might overlook pitfalls when explaining it to someone who doesn't have your background, for example, while someone who has only just got the grasp of it might be well aware of what might confuse a newbie, so I think there is some value in unexperienced people writing about what they learn and how they learn it, with appropriate disclaimers, and assuming that they still try to not state as fact anything they aren't actually sure about.

And I also think, to a degree, it actually is the responsibility of the reader to judge what to use that supposed new knowledge for. Trying to make sense of tcpdump output when debugging some application software bug? Why not? Writing an IP stack? I hope any sensible person would pick up a book and some RFCs first. Unreliable knowledge can still be useful and harmless in figuring things out, you just shouldn't use it to try and build things.

Then again, practically, we can observe that people do build systems without ever having looked into the relevant standards, and I would actually argue the effects are worse than one superficially might think. I mean, if you look at how ridiculously insecure the web/web browsers are, for example - how did that come to be? I would think one major factor is exactly that people didn't (and often still don't) read the relevant standards, something as apparently uncritical as the HTML spec or the HTTP spec, but instead just wrote what they thought was HTML, and wrote books about what they thought was HTML, and so on - resulting in a need for browser vendors to accomodate all this crap out there that isn't HTML or HTTP but that people still expect to be rendered by their browser in some way or another, and so, due to end-user market share pressure, we now have security vulnerabilities in browsers that are there only because fixing them would break stuff that noone really ever had any right to expect to work, but they thought they were just creating some totally uncritical website using the "knowledge" they learned from some other clueless person, and those security problems can have quite serious consequences.

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#37

Post by frankzinger »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #7
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, what do you do? Is this knowledge germane to where you work? I've just recently become interested in this stuff, so I'm curious to get a lay of the land.

I do ... software development? ;-) There isn't really any particular category for what I do, though I tend to do more of the lower-level/backend stuff of projects, and knowing how the stuff that you build on works internally certainly is useful in optimizing and debugging. As for getting an understanding of how TCP/IP works, I think Stevens' classic TCP/IP Illustrated still is a good book to get started, even if some…

TCP/IP Illustrated has a new edition (volume 1 only for now, AFAICT) which has been updated with much more modern content, including lots of info about IPv6: http://www.informit.com/store/tcp-ip-illustrated-volume-1-th...

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#38

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

frankzinger wrote: post #37
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do ... software development? ;-) There isn't really any particular category for what I do, though I tend to do more of the lower-level/backend stuff of projects, and knowing how the stuff that you build on works internally certainly is useful in optimizing and debugging. As for getting an understanding of how TCP/IP works, I think Stevens' classic TCP/IP Illustrated still is a good book to get started, even if some…

TCP/IP Illustrated has a new edition (volume 1 only for now, AFAICT) which has been updated with much more modern content, including lots of info about IPv6: http://www.informit.com/store/tcp-ip-illustrated-volume-1-th...

Well, yeah, it's a book by the same name, but is it the same quality (well, it's not just the same name, of course, but a new author obviously can make a big change in quality, in either direction ;-)?

In any case, my recommendation was referring to the old edition by Stevens alone, no clue about the new one, though at least the newly covered material seems appropriate to me.

(For anyone who might not be aware: W. Richard Stevens died in 1999, so the new edition is by a different author, though apparently based on the old material.)

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#39

Post by laichzeit0 »

If you want to learn about IP, TCP, UDP and some of the protocols below this I would highly recommend reading Richard Stevens book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols.

For two reasons: It's probably one of the best introductions to the subject that has ever been written, and it's a model example of how a technical book should be written.

I'd be hard pressed to find a reason not to go this route at least once in your life. I know the material pretty well but I still re-read Stevens books every few years just because it is so good.

Re: Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

#40

Post by beggi »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #39

If you want to learn about IP, TCP, UDP and some of the protocols below this I would highly recommend reading Richard Stevens book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols. For two reasons: It's probably one of the best introductions to the subject that has ever been written, and it's a model example of how a technical book should be written. I'd be hard pressed to find a reason not to go this route at least once…

TCP/IP Illustrated books are super detailed. If you don't want to dive quite that deep I recommend "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet".
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