(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best computer networks books

Well, most of them you will find are just like the one you have very heavy reading and slow. If you are a real glutton for punishment, the real meat of everything is spelled out in the RFC's(Request for Comments). This one is pretty short and to the point, if you can understand it, it will help you understand most other networking jargon:

-----
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1180.txt

it is described thusly:

1. Introduction
   
   This tutorial contains only one view of the salient points of TCP/IP,
   and therefore it is the "bare bones" of TCP/IP technology.
   
   ------
   
   So, its just the nitty gritty, but most times, I find that is the best place to get started. Some of the things you will want to learn/study are the different networking layers specifcally layer2(switched/VLAN) and layer3(routed) networking. You will want to learn about SNMP and ARP as they are both very important to networking and network management. If you are interested in the nitty gritty details of how packets get pushed around the network, you will want to learn about some of the dynamic routing procotols used, such as BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, and RIP. There are others as well, but these will definitely get you started.
   
   My suggestion is this, if you can, study the RFC"s as they will give you a nuts and bolts understanding of what needs to happen. That will soften the blow going into any networking books you might run into. If you are specifically looking for networking books, you can almost never go wrong with O'reilly books. However, I always poke around on Amazon reviews before buying a book as if there is a better book, it will often be mentioned.
   
   Here are a few that adorn my bookshelf:
   
   http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Vol-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0201633469
   
   being that I am in network mgmt, SNMP is crucial, here are some good ones:
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Snmpv3-Network-Management/dp/0130214531/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322060915&sr=1-6
   
   http://www.amazon.com/SNMP-Management-Sidnie-M-Feit/dp/0070203598/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322060915&sr=1-5
   
   and for the true masochist:
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-SNMP-MIBs-David-Perkins/dp/0134377087/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322060915&sr=1-4
   
   for the routing protocols:
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Networking-2nd-Jeffrey-S-Beasley/dp/0131358383/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322061108&sr=1-11
   
   Let me know if you have any specific questions and I will see if I can point you in the right direction! Good luck.
   

Network + is probably best for an intro, but CCENT will provide you some basic networkig and get more advanced as you progress (networking in regards to cisco) . A good book for an introduction to networking would be this book. This was a great book to introducing me to networking (used it in my college class). I am currently reading this book as a prerequisite for cisco networking. This book is great to refresh what I know on networking, also it is great to teach you some basic cisco networking!

Ok. When I started planning for CCENT I had all my ducks in a row except for labs. "Labs!", thought I, "I need more labs!!"

I found free online labs (google free cisco labs), found unprotected netacad labs by googling exact subjects (...not sure if I should... ah, shag it, here's an example) like "CCNA inter-vlan routing lab" and bought a Netacad lab companion book. I also found a bunch of free resources - but I was still stressed that I wasn't doing it structured enough. I bought Bombal's lab course on Udemy (you can also download the labs and get associated PDFs) but I was still stressed.

Then I started studying and I realized I didn't need all that stuff (it's still very helpful, don't get me wrong).

I'm using the OCG heavily, so basically when I come to next concepts, I try to create them in Packet Tracer or my home lab. I don't have 1-2-3 lab layouts to follow, but I'm still labbing each concept as I come to it. I supplement with Bombal and checking youtube for specific concepts.

If you have the OCG and Packet Tracer, I think you'll be fine - it's missing some of the commands real gear has, but it's highly helpful - and free. I haven't used GNS3, but I understand you need images of Routers and Switches in order to simulate the software, which you're not likely to have or perhaps want to deal with.

Good luck!

MSEE (wireless & communications) here. I perform studies and do various research on communications technologies and am involved in all 4 of the items you listed (though I am more of an antenna user than theorist).

I would start by trying to do some reading of introductory books on all of these subjects and at the same time trying to do something practical to reinforce these things. RF instrumentation is generally VERY expensive, but check out /r/RTLSDR. There is some pretty neat stuff that you can do yourself for a $20 investment.

As far as books, I just got a great new book that really provides a substantiative, modern overview of communication standards. Balanis is basically the gold standard for antenna reference books though most find this text pretty dry. I am not going to be very effective at providing you an overview of RF Engineering book or Networking book, I have many but none I would recommend as a good 'overview' since the subjects are so broad.

If you have any more specific questions I would be happy to help if I can. Just read, read, read and back that up with some practical knowledge. Being able to communicate some information about practical experiences during interviews etc... will go a long way.

If you're a novice, as most people start out as, then I would recommend the following:

The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing: Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Made Easy

Hacking For Dummies

Grey Hat Hacking

Hacking Exposed - 5th Edition - May be outdated

Network Security Bible

So now people here may disagree on the books I've suggested, and that's fine, but it definitely depends on what you're trying to learn and/or accomplish. Google is a great place to start as well without spending a fortune on books.

Some great websites:

SANS
Dark Reading

I'm sure you can find plenty more.

And always ask questions, even if you think its a stupid question. Being on Reddit and having the luxury of anonymity, you can ask away without worrying about getting personally ridiculed.

As far as hackerspaces and defcon, they were just a suggestion. If you ever are able to get to a hackerspace though, I highly recommend it.

how deep in the weeds do you want to get into OSPF? do you want to understand enough just to be able to troubleshoot and bring up a new router, or [re]design the entire network?
John Moy's book should still be the standard; he wrote the RFC.

If you want to actually design a network, I still love Russ White's Cisco Press book on Optimal Routing Design.

If you just want an overview, the Cisco OSPF design guide can give you the nomenclature. Though the examples are IOS, the principles carry over.

Along with /u/totallygeek recommendations, if you're going to deploy OSPF onto a network, I would add:

• Figure out what you're trying to gain from using OSPF that you currently don't have in your current network. Redundancy? Faster convergence? Building out a WAN?
  
• Layout the IP addressing FIRST. You're designing an IP network... worry first about the IP addressing before speeds and feeds.
  
• OSPF, IM(strong)O, should be used modularly. Hand in hand with your IP addressing, you really should take advantage of building different areas. Don't go overboard and create multiple areas just for the heck of it, but don't get lazy and put everything into area 0 either.
  
• Decide how you will split up your network. Will it be based along functional business units (i.e., financing, warehouse, engineering), location based (floors, buildings, cities, geographic regions) or in some other way.
  
• Be stringent with what you advertise inter-area, either using access-lists/routing filters as suggested, or better yet, with the more flexible route-maps.
  
  Personally, I would stay away from virtual links as your abstracting what should be physical links onto harder-to-troubleshoot virtual links. I would also keep the area IDs the same as the top level network. For instance, if I was using 172.16.0.0/16 as the supernet for a building, the OSPF area ID would also be 172.16.0.0/16, but that's just me. There is more than 1 way to build a good network and as long as you are consistent on a logical design, that's what matters.

Yeah man, no problem.

Before I find some specific books, I wanna mention one series that you've definitely heard of: Blank for Dummies. From my experience, if you want to start from no knowledge and work up to an intermediate level of understanding, For Dummies books are great. A lot of experts beg to differ.

But, to be frank, people who are experts in their field are just that: experts in their field. I have friends who are excellent in their fields, but they are terrible teachers. They expect people to pick things up as quicky as they did. We're not all wired that way, and For Dummies books get that.

So, for my first two recommendations, here ya go:

Networking for Dummies

Building Your Own PC for Dummies

Both of those are less than 20 bucks on Amazon, and I'm sure you can find them at a library.

Now, if you really want to get into networking, and you want to get in to the IT field, you should read the A+ and Network+ certification books from Comptia. These will be harder to find in a library, but there will probably be some older editions lying around somewhere. If you know someone who works in the field, they probably have a copy, or can get you a copy, for free or cheap.

These books are more expensive, and more difficult, but they are peerless if you want to jumpstart a career in IT. I'm not going to claim that getting an A+ and/or a Network+ (or a Security+) certification is going to guarantee you a job. However it will definitely help you get your foot in the door.

Other books that you'll want to eventually check out if you want to check out things from O'Reilly. Most of their books are not meant for beginners, but they are the quintessential reference books in the IT field, including computer science, networking, and security. To give you an idea of just how many books they have, check out this picture of the programming section at the Noisebridge Hackerspace in San Francisco.

That band of colorful books in the middle? Those are (some of) the programming books they have available. They have just as many on every topic of IT. Here's their networking section. 19 pages. Of just networking books.

I hope that gives you a good idea of where to start.

I would say this book is a great place to start for .NET Core. https://www.amazon.com/ASP-NET-Core-Application-Development-application-ebook/dp/B01N9E92QY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1486226226&sr=8-2&keywords=.net+core

https://www.microsoft.com/net/tutorials/csharp/getting-started is also a great start for just C# in general.

Also, write Katas in C#. For just learning new techniques and such, Katas are a great way to hone in your skills in the beginning.

I would also just recommend looking in to some Open Source C#, .Net/.NET Core projects too.

Hope this helps!

here is my 2c

it is crucial that you understand subnet masking as it's like 70% of ipv4 networking and unfortunately the first thing you need to wrap your brain around as you will be working with VLSM in most networking labs/scenarios. download this pdf and just start plugging along..

Sormcontrol.net is a nice online tool to help with learning subnets.


once you finish that workbook and feel comfortable with variable length subnets, start working on these problems in your spare time and at your own pace. your goal should be to solve any single subnetting problem within 30 seconds.


now that you understand a bit of subnetting, you need to begin learning the OSI-model, focus mainly on the layers 1 (sending bits across a medium), 2 (mac address switching) ,3 (ip routing), and 4 (tcp, udp, and icmp ports). here are two of my favorite beginners books to networking.
Microsoft Windows Networking Essentials, &
Cisco Introduction to Networks V6


Once you've read those books you should be ready to learn routing and switching. Focus your attention here to static routing, dhcp, nat, basic ACLs, and to understanding switchports and vlan related things like trunking and routing on a stick.

Next book you want to read is going to be on dynamic routing and scaling networks for large environments.This is where you delve into dynamic routing protocols (RIP, EIGRP, OSPF) and redundancy/failover protocols such as spanning-tree, etherchannel, and HSRP.


This is a nice book to read along the way and to sort of tie all of the knowledge you've learned so far together into short succinct chapters.

Download GNS3 or Packet Tracer if you want to simulate networks and labs at your desktop. You can learn a lot about the concepts and protocols presented in the books by searching on youtube things like "GNS3 dhcp" or "Packet Tracer dhcp".

I don't know about CBT nuggets, but just focus on what I've linked you and if you are going to follow anything online, the topic of routing and switching is the way to go as it is fundamental. Study like you are trying to pass the CCENT exam and then study for the CCNA exam.

Automate the Boring stuff with Python is a pretty good book that covers some basics of things and gets the creative juices flowing. They also have one for Powershell.

​

The other book that I found really interesting was Practical Packet Analysis. It really opened my eyes to the power of wireshark.

​

And enough can't be said for Phoenix Project. Really interesting read that explains it in a real world like scenario instead of just a White Paper of how to do stuff. Above all else...avoid being a Brent.

For my college class "QoS/MPLS" we used this book. It's not very big, but goes through the different parts of QoS very well. This might be more interesting if you are also working with QoS in MPLS, but i thought that i could just mention it.

Oh yeah! The CBTnugget about QoS is really good too!

I would also like to take the time to plug a few resources, if I may, that have greatly assisted me throughout my career.

1. Of course, Cisco Press. Wendell Odom especially.
   
2. Non-Cisco Press, Todd Lamlle's CCNA book is great!
   
3. CBT Nuggets!! Jeremy Cioara and Keith Barker.
   
4. Tech Exams Forums!! For answers to your questions regarding certification, study material, etc, from a variety of vendor certs. Or, to just read motivating success stories!!
   
5. Internetworking Experts (INE!) That link should direct you to their free CCNA video course. If that doesn't work for you, simply register an account with them and search for the CCNA video course.
   
6. Thomas Limoncelli's The Practice of Systems and Network Administration
   
7. Gary A Donahue's Network Warrior
   
8. Jeff Doyle's CCIE Professional Development Routing TCP/IP Vol. 1 or 2
   
9. Douglas E. Comer's Internetworking with TCP/IP
   
10. GNS3!! Free Cisco Router and ASA Emulation!! Just make sure you have access to Cisco IOS software!
    
11. Andrew S. Tanenbaum's Computer Networks.
    
12. Jeremy Stretch and PacketLife!! Also, Jeremy's network Cheat Sheets!
    
13. Firewall.cx!!
    
14. Cisco's Command Lookup Tool! Requires login, but nonetheless, a great resource for your Cisco engineers when you just NEED to know how the hell a particular command works.
    
15. Priscilla Oppenheimer's Top-Down Network Design
    
16. I've heard the folks at /r/networking are pretty legit.

Doesn't have to be real time, and storage isn't an issue.

Would recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Network-Security-Monitoring-Understanding-ebook/dp/B00E5REN34

It would require some man power, but they already have it available. If they wanted, they could go for instantaneous recognition of invasion, but chances are they weren't broken into instantaneously (unless they were given access, which is entirely possible, but the best network security in the world can't get by some jackass giving people access to their systems). The whole thing just reeks of fear-mongering, to me.

I'm getting good mileage out of David Copeland's Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby 2 (2013). For Ruby-specific best practices (I'm coming from PHP), Sandi Metz' Practical Object-Oriented Design (2019) and Russ Olsen's Eloquent Ruby (2011) are opening my eyes to how it's done here. In particular, Metz' focus on the role of messages in OO design has changed my approach to planning and testing - just in time for a critical project.

The short answer is: it depends heavily on the network and application, but that it's usually bound by either application-layer rendering, or number of round trips (hereafter RTTs), reduced by the amount of parallelism that's possible. RTTs these days often can't be made faster, (networks have gotten smart and fiber isn't getting any faster) and so have to be reduced in number. While protocols have some control over this, it's often application-layer concerns that determine the number of RTTs and how many can be processed in parallel.

Some things that are usually not bottle necks are encryption/TLS overhead (especially on modern networking stacks and modern processors), "fetch" attempts for intelligently cached resources, network fragmentation, routing, DNS, etc. except in pathological edge cases that should be diagnosed separately.

The long answer is: https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Browser-Networking-performance/dp/1449344763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474953613&sr=8-1&keywords=high+performance+browser+networking

Well if you're interested in getting into security these books helped me get a grasp on the concepts.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1435483529

Another thing is learning to use firewalls. Being exposed to the devices and using them at home has helped me a lot as well. It also sounds good to someone interviewing you.

I haven't checked out that book but am happy to see there is some new material. I learned from the irc channel, forums, official training, and Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring book.

Rihards was responsible for the book and also does the training. His book is very dated though and doesn't have a LOT of the new Zabbix features. He knows we want a newer one but he is a busy guy.

Best book on the SIP protocol
https://www.amazon.com/SIP-Understanding-Initiation-Protocol-Telecommunications/dp/1607839954

Best book on SIP Trunking
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B003ATPQEI/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_b003atpqei

If you are trying to shore up what you feel are knowledge gaps regarding networking - I am a fan of Chris Sanders practical packet analysis He has training that if fairly reasonable if you company does reimbursement His Site

Grab a book like TCP IP illustrated, which is very in depth, makes a great reference, and is vendor agnostic.

Heres some book I have bought in the past on Programming. You can just download a PDF/e-reader file if you dont want to spend the money, but I would recommend supporting the author.

Programming:

Python Game Developement

Pro Python

Java For Dummies

How to Program Java

Networking:

Networking All-In-One

Networking: A Beginner's Guide

General:

Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

So this questions comes up not infrequently. For more specific guidelines, I'd recommend searching this subreddit a bit.

I hear network warrior is good.

Personally, I learned from this dry, boring text. However it IS good.

Yep! Just hanging around to see if anything breaks, really. Reading up on Optimal Routing Design for fun in the meantime.

Data and Computer Communications by William Stallings

This is the book that I used in my "Network Theory & Test" course in university. This book has some pretty deep material with networks in the logical and physical realm. The previous edition to the one I listed also had chapters on crypto and how that worked.

For those wanting to read more, I highly recommend the Browser Networking book that covers WebRTC, STUN, TURN, ICE, and more.

https://www.amazon.ca/Top-Down-Network-Design-Priscilla-Oppenheimer/dp/1587202832

This was my networking textbook

https://www.amazon.com/Optimal-Routing-paperback-Networking-Technology/dp/1587142449/

:^ )

Network Warrior: Everything You Need to Know That Wasn't on the CCNA Exam Second Edition

Practical Packet Analysis, 3E: Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems 3rd Edition

DNS and BIND (5th Edition)

Hint: It's plain text. Totally unencrypted. And there is no such thing as a telnet network. Telnet is a command line protocol used to control devices remotely. All it does is send ascii text back and forth. None of the protocols you listed were encrypted protocols. SSL (secure sockets layer) is used to encrypt other protocols (ie https) but it is not a communication protocol in and of its self.
You might want to do some reading on both networking protocols, and wireshark.
Start here:

Practical Packet Analysis, 3E: Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems https://www.amazon.com/dp/1593278020/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_3amXAb1FZT4YJ