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Basic Networks

⏱️ ETC: 5 hours

Understanding networking and TCP/IP in blockchain is like knowing the rules of the road before building a highway. Blockchain networks are nothing else than distributed systems running on top of the Internet, making networking knowledge not just useful, but absolutely critical.

When you're troubleshooting why your nodes aren't syncing properly, you need to understand concepts like network latency, UDP vs TCP connections, and port configurations. The blockchain's peer-to-peer network relies heavily on TCP/IP for node discovery, block propagation, and transaction broadcasting – it's the fundamental building block that allows nodes to communicate across the globe.

A good and consise reference for understanding the different layers of networks is the Network Basics chapter of the Linux Journey. After gaining some intuition, the suggested route for learning networks fast is a YouTube series called Network Foundamentals.

Another must-do exercise is setting up your own HTTP server, making it serve a sub-directory of your own file system and then trying to shield it from various attacks like LFI and XSS.

💡 Tasks

Optional​

For those seeking to deepen their understanding beyond the essentials, we recommend the 2 points of reference regarding Networks: Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks" for its comprehensive coverage of network architecture and protocols from a systems perspective, and Kurose & Ross's "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach" for its practical, Internet-focused implementation insights. Both of those books are mandatory reads for gaining advanced networking expertise.

Another interesting and well-thought Youtube series is the Networking Tutorial by Ben Eeater focusing on each network layer respectively.