Computer Networks

A book-shaped table of contents for computer networking, from first principles to production systems: Ethernet through IP, TCP/UDP/QUIC, DNS, the HTTP ecosystem, security, cloud/Kubernetes networking, performance engineering, observability/debugging, and distributed-systems networking — cross-linking existing kubernetes/sre/system-design/tech notes instead of duplicating them.

1 — Network Performance

Bandwidth vs. latency, bufferbloat, tail latency, and head-of-line blocking as the performance concepts that separate a fast network from a merely working one.

2 — Connection Management

Connection pools, keep-alive, timeouts, retries, and circuit breakers as the client-side levers for managing unreliable network connections.

3 — Compression

gzip, Brotli, and HTTP compression as the payload-optimization techniques that trade CPU for bandwidth.

4 — Caching

Browser cache, CDN cache, reverse-proxy cache, and application cache as the layered caching strategy behind most low-latency systems.