Networking for System AdministratorsMichael W. Lucas
Networking for System Administrators
by Michael W. Lucas · first published 2025
11mentions
3recommended by
3HN commenters
2022–2025first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
This book by Michael Lucas is an indespensible guide for those who are not network engineers or network administrators themselves: Networking for System Administrators: https://mwl.io/nonfiction/networking#n4sa
on “Basic Network Troubleshooting” ↗Not IPv6 specific, but I can't recommend Networking for System Administrators by Michael Lucas highly enough. Very well written and easy to understand.
on “Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023” ↗I came here to say Anki is my lifeline for grokking difficult things like DNS. It was in fact on jvns.ca's book recommendation that I got Michael W. Lucas's _Networking for System Administrators_, and strip mined it for Anki cards containing both technical know-how and more than a little sysadmin wisdom. It might be one of the highest ROI books I've ever read, considering I actually remember…
on “Making Hard Things Easy” ↗…you had basically no idea how networking actually worked, because your whole mental model was based off of the Wikipedia article on the OSI model, and decided to cram all 180 pages of Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators into your head with Anki cards to finally make the "real" stuff stick. (Terrific book, terrific writer, I will never get tired of recommending this one in particular.)
on “The OSI Deprogrammer” ↗Sitting down with Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators and making Anki flashcards out of them was probably the highest impact thing I did for my career last spring. It's an incredible tool, truly. Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to…
on “Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards” ↗…teaching and retaining the low level networking basics. Even after a college course on the subject the only way it truly clicked with me in a laying way was by Ankifying Michael W. Lucas's phenomenal Networking for System Administrators, and now a solid 30% of problems I run across on a daily basis are made easier by having that knowledge at my fingertips.
on “Network protocols for anyone who knows a programming language (2017)” ↗…together a log of exactly what happened when. This kind of psuedo-non-repudiation can be invaluable for debugging sessions when you least expect it. This was a tip I distilled from Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators a few years ago, which remains my preferred recommendation for any developers looking to learn just enough about networking to not feel totally lost when talking to an actual network engineer. Bonus…
on “Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell” ↗Not sure what do you want, from the Sys Admin point of view or the IPv6 itself? For Sys Admin, this book is helpful, "Networking for System Administrators": https://mwl.io/nonfiction/networking For IPv6 this Cisco book is one of the best books on the subject, "IPv6 Fundamentals: A Straightforward Approach to Understanding IPv6", 2nd Edition: https://www.ciscopress.com/store/ipv6-fundamentals-a-straigh...
on “Linux for Networking Professionals” ↗Spaced repetition is great! Reading and making around 300 Anki cards out of Networking for System Administrators was one of the highest ROI things I did in a while - I finally understand at a high level how all those networking stacks actually work together, and I know a bunch of useful new command line tools to…
on “Memorizing a programming language using spaced repetition software (2013)” ↗Networking for System Administrators is often my recommendation for this. The author walks all the way up the stack from the physical layer up and name-drops every program and file he uses: `ethtool`, `/etc/hosts`, `/etc/resolv.conf`, `ipconfig`,…
on “Ethernet: The Basics” ↗Re/ knowing older protocols, I recently took a few weeks to read _Networking for System Administrators_ and take+review copious Anki card notes. It's incredible just how much more confident I feel around understanding networking at a high level, including both DNS and all the stuff underneath it, like…
on “Why is DNS still hard to learn?” ↗