As of today, I am at podcast #26 of Security Now! and Steve with Leo are have started their "foundation series" on How Internet works. It is really great and enjoyable topic, nicely and very enjoyably presented. Given the delivery format limitation (voice without possibility of adding any drawing), there is of course limit on the amount of details that can be presented. Being a curious creature, I wanted to dig little bit deeper into "excruciating details" of TCP/IP and started to search for a good book.

Today at Chapters, I scanned few books and here is the result: What I thought would be the best authoritative guide - The TCP/IP Illustrated - did not work for me. It is supposedly "the" book on TCP/IP authored by the Richard Stevens of the Advanced Unix Programming fame (which is a great book), but the writing style is fairly dry and often it looks like you cannot see the forest for the trees.

Fortunately the second book I picked - TCP/IP Guide - was IMHO much better written. And even better, the book's content is available on-line as well. You can read for free on-line or purchase the PDF.

Hooray into the Alphabet soup: ICMP, ARP, RARP, IPSec, CIDR, RIP, OSPF, BGP, OMG ... oops, that is not a protocol :-)