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Comment by vajrabum | Hacker News Reader

All Beej's guides are fantastic, but if you're interested in Network programming you could do way worse than follow this up with his guide to network concepts. https://beej.us/guide/bgnet0/

If you search Algolia for Beej you'll see his material has been on hacker news numerous times.

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Anyone knows of a well-rounded guide that explains the structure of the Internet at large? I know everything listed in the one you linked, but I have a nebulous idea of how anything works after my packet exits my gateway.

So, BGP, autonomous systems, peering agreements and other site-to-site routing protocols that keep the entire Internet infrastructure ticking along.

I don't know of any one resource that gives a overview of everything, I find that browsing Wikipedia for each topic gives a good overview of each topic though, with the overview being the "Internet Architecture" category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Internet_architecture

Some bookmarks I have regarding BGP and peering that dives into it a bit:

- https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/bgp-border-...

- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-a...

- https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/iproute_bg...

https://learn.cantrill.io/p/tech-fundamentals

I found Cantrill’s course pretty solid. It is free and you can just skip to DNS & DNSSEC.

Oh, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Be suspicious of anything that includes DNSSEC in the "tech fundamentals", since it's rarely implemented (low single digit percentage uptake in the major TLDs). What other complexity are they failing to screen out?

Agreed and yeah he mentions that. I think he mostly just makes you familiar with DNSSEC because he sells AWS certification courses and it will come up on the Networking Specialty. The entire segment is only like 90 minutes so it’s not crazy in depth.

I thought "How the Internet Really Works" (https://nostarch.com/how-internet-really-works) was pretty good.

> If you search Algolia for Beej...

Or, as I just recently learned, you can click on the (beej.us) domain name next to the title at the top of this page and it will take you to a list of all the HN submissions for the site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=beej.us

Nice! Thanks! For years on HN and I didn't know that.

I agree with everything you said. Additionally, I think that the ZeroMQ guide is also a great resource to learn a lot of the common networking patterns, even if you don't plan on using ZeroMQ directly.

https://zguide.zeromq.org/

Is this better as a preface to Network Programming or a suffix?

Yes, it seems reading about the concepts should be done first.

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