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Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

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Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#41

Post by fgandiya »

nindalf wrote: post #30

I took a networking course in college and I didn't learn much, if anything. We used textbooks like Kurose and Ross that went deep into details like the header format of each packet of each layer. Ultimately, these were useless details that had no place in a textbook. It made me hate the subject. I eventually learned the subject properly through High Performance Browser Networking. This is the one book I would recomme…

Same with my college networking class. The professor talked a lot but we didn't do much besides look at HTTP requests in Wireshark.

The most practical thing I had to do with networking cane up in a job interview where I paired with someone to work on some low later stuff.

Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#42

Post by fgandiya »

gumby wrote: post #24
thijsvandien wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#44

Post by audiolion »

mrmuagi wrote: post #36
nindalf wrote: post #30

I took a networking course in college and I didn't learn much, if anything. We used textbooks like Kurose and Ross that went deep into details like the header format of each packet of each layer. Ultimately, these were useless details that had no place in a textbook. It made me hate the subject. I eventually learned the subject properly through High Performance Browser Networking. This is the one book I would recomme…

I'd largely echo your sentiment, but luckily our professor had a hands-on attitude. This involved actually coding things that used those concepts. We had to implement a non-recursive DNS resolver and a FTP server. Reading the RFCs and chewing out something that worked (mostly) was real fun.

Same here, we did examine headers and learn about the layers of networking, but we were also given the link to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt and told to implement a DNS resolver in C. We also did a peer-to-peer client. You learn a lot more by implementing it.

Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#46

Post by walshemj »

fgandiya wrote: post #41
nindalf wrote: post #30

I took a networking course in college and I didn't learn much, if anything. We used textbooks like Kurose and Ross that went deep into details like the header format of each packet of each layer. Ultimately, these were useless details that had no place in a textbook. It made me hate the subject. I eventually learned the subject properly through High Performance Browser Networking. This is the one book I would recomme…

Same with my college networking class. The professor talked a lot but we didn't do much besides look at HTTP requests in Wireshark. The most practical thing I had to do with networking cane up in a job interview where I paired with someone to work on some low later stuff.

They didn't have you setting up networks with real hardware in a LAB ?

Not sure that starting with http requests is a good idea you need to start at layer 1 and work up.

Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#47

Post by sciurus »

walshemj wrote: post #46
fgandiya wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with my college networking class. The professor talked a lot but we didn't do much besides look at HTTP requests in Wireshark. The most practical thing I had to do with networking cane up in a job interview where I paired with someone to work on some low later stuff.

They didn't have you setting up networks with real hardware in a LAB ? Not sure that starting with http requests is a good idea you need to start at layer 1 and work up.

This is pretty frequently debated. You can find textbooks that start at L1 and work up the stack, and others that start at L7 and go down.

Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#48

Post by teacpde »

swinglock wrote: post #29
pests wrote: post #26

The slow start mentioned in the transmission control section has an interesting history. Back when most internet packets were single characters representing keystrokes over something like Telnet, an algorithm was invented to wait a moment before sending ACKs in order to possobily piggy back out on the next data packet. This ended up interplaying with TCP slow start and adaptaive congestion control for years and was o…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm

It is awesome that two of the wiki references are the author's comments here on HN.

Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#49

Post by dublin »

sciurus wrote: post #47
walshemj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't have you setting up networks with real hardware in a LAB ? Not sure that starting with http requests is a good idea you need to start at layer 1 and work up.

This is pretty frequently debated. You can find textbooks that start at L1 and work up the stack, and others that start at L7 and go down.

Starting at Layer 7 is a fundamental mistake, because it perpetuates the execrable and obsolete OSI 7-layer model. Since IP protocols DO NOT map cleanly to the OSI model, trying to shoehorn IP into it causes more misunderstanding than anything else I've seen in networking. Seriously - IGNORE the 7-layer model if you want to understand real-world protocols and their design, especially anything IP-flavored.

(BTW, David Clark, one of the inventors of IP, told me over beers at a long ago Interop that the only reason there are 7 layers is because ISO arbitrarily set up 7 subcommittees to study the problem, and when they couldn't agree on where to draw the lines between the layers when they reconvened, they just made the diplomatic compromise of sticking with the subcommittee boundaries. That's why the OSI model so poorly reflects real world protocol implementations. AFAIK, other than the OSI protocols themselves (MAP/TOP, etc.), which unwisely used the model as an implementation guide, the only protocol to cleanly map to the OSI model is X.25. Does anyone actually use any OSI protocols anymore?)

Re: Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language

#50

Post by porpoisely »

nindalf wrote: post #30

I took a networking course in college and I didn't learn much, if anything. We used textbooks like Kurose and Ross that went deep into details like the header format of each packet of each layer. Ultimately, these were useless details that had no place in a textbook. It made me hate the subject. I eventually learned the subject properly through High Performance Browser Networking. This is the one book I would recomme…

That's sad to hear. I agree that colleges can be too textbook-centric. I'd read a chapter and get nowhere. Did your college have a lab or projects? Mine had us built a rudimentary FTP server, telnet server, a toy instant messenger client, etc. I don't think I could have learned networking simply on the textbook alone. Also playing around network sniffers, network explorers, etc can help.
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