Computer Networking Roadmap

Basics → IP → subnetting → routing → DNS → UDP → TCP → TLS → HTTP → HTTP/2 & 3 → sockets → proxies and load balancing → CDNs → debugging → distributed-system networking. Every node opens its lesson; progress is stored locally.

0 / 72 lessons mastered
  1. 1

    Network basics

    0/9

    Press Enter on a URL and see the whole ladder once; then the layer model, encapsulation, and local delivery — frames, MAC addresses, ARP / Neighbor Discovery, and what separates a switch from a router.

  2. 2

    IP

    0/4

    Best-effort packet delivery across links that do not know each other: the IP header, IPv4 and IPv6 as two different protocols (not one with bigger addresses), and what a port actually identifies.

  3. 3

    Subnetting

    0/2

    CIDR, masks, and the question every host asks before every packet — "is this next door or via the gateway?" — then NAT, the translation table that let IPv4 outlive its address space.

  4. 4

    Routing

    0/3

    A router with three matching routes picks the longest prefix; the routing table on your own laptop; and how the internet is stitched from autonomous systems announcing prefixes with BGP.

  5. 5

    DNS

    0/4

    From engineer-atlas.dev to an address: the cache chain, recursive resolution through root, TLD and authoritative servers, record types and TTLs — and the failure simulator that explains "it works after five minutes".

  6. 6

    UDP

    0/1

    A transport that will lose your data, and why DNS, real-time media and QUIC choose exactly that.

  7. 7

    TCP

    0/8

    Building a reliable ordered byte stream out of packets that can be lost, duplicated and reordered: the handshake, sequence numbers, loss recovery, rwnd and cwnd, head-of-line blocking and the state machine through TIME_WAIT.

  8. 8

    TLS

    0/3

    TCP delivers bytes but not confidentiality or identity: the TLS 1.3 handshake, key agreement, and the certificate chain that lets a browser trust a server it has never met.

  9. 9

    HTTP

    0/5

    Requests, responses, headers and status codes; one request followed through its lifecycle; HTTP/1.1 and its one-request-at-a-time connection; keep-alive and connection pools, and the idle-timeout race they create.

  10. 10

    HTTP/2 & HTTP/3

    0/5

    Why HTTP needed two transport redesigns — HTTP/2 multiplexing over one TCP stream, then HTTP/3 over QUIC — and the real-time options built on top: WebSockets, SSE and polling.

  11. 11

    Sockets

    0/3

    What the kernel actually hands you when you call socket(), and how a network namespace gives every container its own descriptors, interfaces and port 80.

  12. 12

    Proxies / Load balancing

    0/5

    What the client is really connected to: forward and reverse proxies, L4 vs L7 balancing and health checks, firewalls and VPN tunnels, and Kubernetes services and ingress as the same ideas with new names.

  13. 13

    CDNs

    0/5

    Geography as a performance layer: edge locations and caches, then the arithmetic that explains them — RTT, bandwidth versus latency, throughput, and where 800 ms goes while the server sits idle.

  14. 14

    Network debugging

    0/11

    "Why can’t I connect?" as a layered procedure, which tool answers which layer, DNS / TCP / TLS / HTTP diagnosis, the capstone, and the packet lab where you inject the failures yourself.

  15. 15

    Distributed-system networking

    0/4

    Where the network meets the process: send() through the kernel to a recv() on another machine, the buffer chain and backpressure when the receiver is slow, and the combined capstone that budgets every millisecond.