Although course 367 is an introductory class, it teaches you everything you need to know to understand how the Internet works. This page gives you pointers to more detail in certain areas. Thanks again for coming to the class, I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to contact us with questions. For something to read, take a look at these TCP/IP books.
IP Addressing and Subnetting
This is often the most difficult area for beginners. Nowadays the
Internet Protocol address space is more frequently classless, which
can make it difficult to understand the original motivation for
the class A, B and C networks. If the original designers had realised
the growth that their technology would be forced to support they
would probably have made some decisions differently!
The important thing to remember is that once the IP layer understands how to use netmasks it no longer really needs to use the address classes — you just use an appropriate netmask to cover the required address space used on your network, and any IP address with the same prefix is recognised as belonging to that network.
If you are relatively new to TCP/IP and still want to fill in gaps in your understanding, you may find Understanding IP Addressing - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know (originally published on 3Com's web site) helpful. Thanks to Jerry Scott for helping me find this once-lost document. A good although brief coverage of CIDR, including a little more detail on the motivation for its adoption, can be found in Pacific Bell's Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) Overview
Multicast Routing
The best short introduction to multicast I have come across so
far is Cisco's Multicast
Routing.
Although this describes different ways that multicast can be achieved,
it unfortunately does not go into any detail at all about the necessary
physical- and datalink-layer support. Such information is remarkably
hard to come by.
