Internet Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide

Organization

This book deals with the basic building block protocols that provide the networking and transport services that all TCP/IP applications and services use. There are chapters on IP, UDP, TCP, and the common support protocols like ICMP, IGMP and ARP. The end of this book also contains appendixes on material that is indirectly related to how these protocols function.

Here’s a more detailed, chapter-by-chapter breakdown:

• Chapter 1, provides a history of TCP/IP, its design objectives, and an overview of the inter-relationships between the different protocols.

• Chapter 2, discusses the Internet Protocol in detail, including fundamentals of IP addresses, packet forwarding, the limited reliability services offered, fragmentation, and prioritization.

• Chapter 3, illustrates how IP devices are able to locate each other on a network, and the variations of ARP that are commonly used for different types of tasks.

• Chapter 4, describes how multicasting works on a network, and how devices register with multicast routers in order to participate in distributed multicast feeds.

• Chapter 5, discusses the error-reporting services used by IP, how the different ICMP messages are implemented, and also shows how the interactive services offered over ICMP can be used to diagnose your network.

• Chapter 6, explores the lightweight, error-prone transport protocol used by applications that don’t need TCP’s reliability service.

• Chapter 7, covers all the major aspects of this excruciatingly complex transport protocol, ...