I've skimmed over some hundreds of pages of various books in order to define a good starting point in this little undertaking of mine. The Tanenbaum book is really great, but it's very theoretical, and painfully detailed. It's definitely not something I want to touch yet. Not coming from IT background has its own drawbacks, especially in more technical areas such as networks.

But here's how I imagine things would start spinning. I used to be a graphic designer. Then moved on to become a frontend developer. Then started playing with web application frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. I thought networking would be the next logical piece of puzzle, but then I noticed there was a missing link. A nicer transition would be to first study the subset of networking called HTTP.

This way, I would have readily usable knowledge directly related to web development (which I do not intend to give up), and still learn basic concepts of how network protocols work without going too low-level.

So I picked up this book by Sams Publishing, HTTP Developer's Handbook by Chris Shiflett (2003). It talks about all those requests, responses, headers, security, and a bit of history here and there. It's quite fun, at least through the first few chapters, very light reading, and I love it. So, I guess this is the ticket to networking I've been looking at.