Networking for Systems Administrators (IT Mastery) (Volume 5)

Book Preface

Who Should Read This Book?

Every sysadmin, database admin, web admin, developer, and computing professional should understand the basic principles of networking. This book grounds you in modern TCP/IP without demanding a month’s dedicated study. Understanding the network will empower you to identify the real source of problems, solve your own problems more quickly, and make better requests of your team members.

This book is also for network administrators who need to educate others in their team about the essentials of networking. After a few years, a network administrator’s understanding of TCP/IP turns into an interconnected morass of window scaling and sequence numbers and malformed packets. Someone asks what a port is, and moments later you’re explaining SYN floods and the questioner has learned the vital lesson of “never ask the network administrator anything.” (This trait isn’t exclusive to network administrators—it’s endemic in the IT industry. Ask a database administrator to explain databases sometime.2) That stuff is all vital to a network administrator’s job, but the average user doesn’t need to understand it. You can use this book to explain only what the average sysadmin absolutely must know about TCP/IP.