
Explore the networking fundamentals by walking through the offside model and the TCP IP stack, from layer one’s Wi-Fi and wired options to MAC addresses, IP addresses, and routers.
Meet the co-authors of networking fundamentals, Alden Chavez and Chris Upland, as they guide newcomers from IT to cybersecurity with expert networking insights and practical training resources.
Explore the OSI seven-layer reference model and the four-layer TCP/IP model, compare layers, and learn why standards ensure interoperability across vendors.
Explore the OSI and TCP/IP models, detailing physical through application layers, MAC address and IP addressing, and encapsulation principles used to prepare data for transmission.
Explore data encapsulation and de-encapsulation as information moves through the application, presentation, session, transport, network, data link, and physical layers, with headers added and removed across hosts in tcp/ip encapsulation.
Explore the physical layer and wireless networking basics, including Wi-Fi, antennas, satellites, and point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links, plus line-of-sight considerations.
Understand wired devices and their cables, including UTP and STP, and how distance limits affect performance. See how fiber optic links enable long distances, high bandwidth, and low latency.
Learn how the layer two mac address uniquely identifies a network interface, with 12 hex digits split into an owner (oui) and device portion, shown on ethernet and wifi adapters.
Switches are layer 2 devices that connect devices via ethernet in wired networks using mac addresses, differing from routers, with various port counts and optional PoE.
Explore how switches use mac addresses and mac address tables to deliver unique traffic, multicast traffic, and broadcast traffic within a broadcast domain, learning host locations across switches.
Explore how IP addresses power layer 3 networking, how routers route traffic between broadcast domains and networks, and how domain names translate to destination IP addresses.
See how routers route between subnets and the internet, with 192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x networks. Explore subnetting's benefits for management, performance, and security, plus ip config and default gateway.
Explore IPv4 fundamentals, four-octet addresses, and decimal versus binary formats. Learn how to convert an octet like 172 to binary and back, setting the stage for network masks.
Explore how the subnet mask divides a network into smaller subnets and governs usable hosts, using slash notations like /24, /25, and /20 with examples of 254 hosts.
Learn how to use network masks to define network IDs and host IDs, calculate available hosts per subnet, and understand network and broadcast addresses and router interfaces.
Explore how the default gateway directs traffic to other networks when no local route matches, using router interfaces as gateways for inter-subnet communication.
Explore reserved IPv4 ranges, including the loopback 127.0.0.1/30 and local host, for private laptop testing that remains not publicly accessible, and learn about other reserved ranges.
Understand why we use public and private IP addresses, how NAT translates private networks to a shared public address, and how private ranges enable device reuse while preserving internet access.
Explore IPv6 and IPv4, compare 32-bit and 128-bit addresses, understand reserved and usable IPv4 space, learn IPv6 formatting and compression, and note their coexistence and transition.
Learn how routers build routing tables using directly connected routes, static routes, and dynamic routes. Understand default routes, such as 0.0.0.0/0, and how IP route commands set next hops across interfaces.
Discover how layer four chooses TCP or UDP and port numbers to govern data delivery, with UDP for real-time VoIP and video calls and TCP for streaming services like Netflix.
Explain how TCP delivers reliable, connection oriented communication between hosts using the three way handshake, supporting requests like get and post, and illustrating denial of service risks.
Explore UDP, a connectionless protocol with no handshake, delivering faster, smaller packets but no recovery, used in video calls, games, DNS, SNMP, and NTP.
Explore how port numbers distinguish sessions and services, covering TCP and UDP ports, well-known, registered, and ephemeral ranges, with practical examples of port usage and security implications.
Explore how layers five through seven coordinate the application, presentation, and session functions. See how browsers and protocols enable end users to view, encode, encrypt, and authenticate data.
Explore how the Ossai model maps to the TCP/IP stack by showing how a web browser uses application, transport, internet, data link, and physical layers to access a website.
About the course:
Networking is easily one of the most commonly recommended topics to learn for anyone interested in being in an IT career, and so it's arguably one of the most important skills to build when starting out. Regardless of what job you end up choosing, having at least a foundational understanding of how data travels all around us is very beneficial.
So in this course, we're going to learn just that starting with how data travels using physical connections. But physical connections alone aren't enough to make the internet work. We also need to answers questions like: how does data know exactly where to go? Say I'm sending an email to someone - how does that email know to go to that other person's inbox, and no one else's?
Or even reading this right now. How did you receive this text and the images on this page that are stored in a different part of the world than where you're located? How does all of it transfer in seconds or even milliseconds?
These are fascinating questions that can be answered once we understand how the physical and virtual backbone of the Internet works. Once we understand how human-readable information gets transformed into a format that machines can process, and then back into a human-readable format again. Once we understand how models and standards were created to dictate a set of rules for how devices should communicate.
Once we look at all of that, and more, then we start to see how everything is interconnected and how the Internet is able to function the way it does.
Join us as we unpack the mysteries of networking and learn Networking Fundamentals that you'll be able to carry with you throughout your entire IT career!