Networking

Protocols, addressing, and the infrastructure that lets computers communicate.

Articles (10)

• How Network Address Translation (NAT) Works
  Network address translation (NAT) lets a router share one public IP address among many devices by rewriting addresses and ports in each packet as it passes through.
• TCP vs UDP: Differences, Use Cases, and When to Use Each
  TCP delivers data reliably and in order using handshakes and retransmission; UDP sends fast, connectionless datagrams. Compare the two and learn when each fits.
• How Email Works
  How email travels from sender to inbox — SMTP delivery, IMAP retrieval, DNS mail routing, message headers, spam filtering, and authentication standards.
• How Wi-Fi Works
  How wireless LANs encode data onto radio waves — channels, modulation, collisions, and why your Wi-Fi speed depends on walls, neighbors, and channel width.
• HTTP Caching
  How Cache-Control, ETag, Last-Modified, and If-None-Match headers let browsers and intermediaries reuse responses, saving bandwidth and load.
• Subnetting and CIDR
  Dividing IP address space into subnets and the Classless Inter-Domain Routing notation that replaced rigid classful addressing.
• TCP Three-Way Handshake
  The three-message exchange TCP uses to open a reliable connection and synchronize sequence numbers between two hosts.
• TCP Congestion Control
  The mechanisms that let TCP share network capacity fairly, adjusting each connection's sending rate in response to congestion signals.
• Domain Name System
  The hierarchical, distributed naming system that maps human-readable domain names to IP addresses and other network records.
• HTTP and HTTPS
  The request–response protocol that powers the World Wide Web, and its encrypted variant secured by TLS.

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