Hello People so i have been on this hunt to start truly understanding networking on a much more detailed level. I took a class with the CTA "Cyber Technologies Academy" for high school students at the Sandia national labs in livermore back in my senior year of high school about two years ago and now I'm starting to get back into the whole subject. Anyways the class I took was on the basics of the Linux operating system and went over the basics of networking i.e. the OSI model, sub-net masking, ssh tunneling ... you know the basic protocols and stuff. But now I'm getting to the point where I really want to understand everything on an advance level. Like how exactly your HTTP request for an html file physically travels through the internet and what happens step by step from each device along the way when your request for that html file and all of its components its linked to hits a data center and sends it to your computer. And how a data center operates on every single level when it comes to the flow of data itself. like what devices it will hit first and what each of those devices do. so if anyone can direct me in the right direction to quench my longing for this knowledge it would be awesome!
In terms of learning networking, (for example routing protocols) Cisco is your best bet. Not saying I like their hardware, but their documents on it all are excellent. Their basic CCNA course goes over quite a bit of everything although not super in-depth but it touches base in a lot of areas. (you can learn a lot just looking at their publicly available information)
In terms of how packets are routed, look at TCP/IP packet structures. Specifically the IP Header portion.
As for datacenters, its all just the same mumbo jumbo just kicked into high gear.
get your Network + Cert, CCNA, CCNP, and so on certs.
Ahhh ok thank you!
Encapsulation is the word, follow this every step of the way and you'll really be able to understand a lot of the architecture behind network protocols. Read RFC's, look up source code in implementations of these protocols. A book you might enjoy reading would be Patterns in Network Architecture.
I have had a job in networking for the last four years. I would start off studying for your ccent certification. it goes over the basics that are needed to help build a foundation for you to move on to more advanced topics plus getting Cisco certificates look really good on a resume. I took a one week class and passed network + I didn't really learn much from that course. Check out CBT nuggets for help on studying.
Read TCPIP by Doyle front to back. It's an old book but covers nigh on everything. And he teaches stuff like summarization the right way.
Go though Cisco and juniper certs. It won't be quick nor cheap but worth it of you want a career out of it.