On 2014.12.04 08:50, Olwe Bottorff wrote: > I've seen all these books that say they're about "networking" . . . and they > seem to be about some corner of networking, typically out-of-date. What I'm > looking for is a modern, up-to-date guide/tutorial that will tell me A, what's > really going on in the world of networking, and B, how to program/sys-admin for > networks. I'd say networking itself doesn't change very quickly. IPv6 is 15 years old and IPv4 classes died 20 years ago. The implementation and details are where things change more often, and it really depends on what you're looking for. Systems administration and network engineering are two completely different fields. Yes, each has to know a bit about the other, but providing some basic network services and provisioning a bunch of Linux boxes to play nice in your own little local network requires a different skill set from making sure a large network (for say, a medium/large business) is properly segregated and all the different types of hosts have connectivity to exactly what they need and nothing more. Pretty much anything decent written in the last 10-15 years that covers the *basics* will be sufficiently up-to-date. Once you have the basics, then you need to (and will be better able to) figure out what part of "networking" you're actually trying to learn.