Report1987
Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities
Paul Mockapetris
Replaces a single flat host table with a distributed, hierarchical namespace delegated across independently administered zones.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Computer Networks
Moving bits between machines that do not trust each other.
11 topics · 34 curated works
Topics
Reading in Computer Networks
34A way in
Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities
Paul Mockapetris · 1987
Replaces a single flat host table with a distributed, hierarchical namespace delegated across independently administered zones.
+3 more at this level
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Internet Protocol
Jon Postel · 1981
Specifies a connectionless, best-effort packet delivery service and pushes reliability entirely to the endpoints, the decision that let heterogeneous…
+10 more at this level
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Primary sources and full treatments.
A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication
Vinton G. Cerf & Robert E. Kahn · 1974
Proposes that networks of different technologies interconnect by agreeing only on how gateways pass packets between them, the design that became…
+18 more at this level
12 of 34 works
Report1989
Information Management: A Proposal
Tim Berners-Lee
Proposes a hypertext system that links documents across a heterogeneous set of existing systems rather than replacing them, becoming the founding proposal for the web.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Book1996
Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
Larry L. Peterson & Bruce S. Davie
Teaches networking bottom-up by asking what problem each layer solves, rather than by having a reader memorise the OSI stack from the outside.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Essay1996
It's the Latency, Stupid
Stuart Cheshire
Argues that many performance problems blamed on insufficient bandwidth are actually caused by latency, which no amount of added bandwidth can fix.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Report1981
Internet Protocol
Jon Postel
Specifies a connectionless, best-effort packet delivery service and pushes reliability entirely to the endpoints, the decision that let heterogeneous networks interconnect without central coordination.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Report1981
Transmission Control Protocol
Jon Postel
Specifies a reliable byte stream built on top of IP's unreliable datagrams using sequence numbers, acknowledgements and a sliding window, and remains the base that every later congestion-control scheme modifies rather than replaces.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper1988
The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
David D. Clark
Argues the internet's protocols were shaped by an explicit priority ordering - survivability first, efficiency and cost last - and that this ordering explains design choices that otherwise look arbitrary.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Report1999
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
Roy Fielding et al.
Formalises persistent connections, caching and content negotiation that ad hoc HTTP/1.0 deployments had already improvised, turning informal practice into an interoperable standard.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2001
DNS Performance and the Effectiveness of Caching
Jaeyeon Jung, Emil Sit, Hari Balakrishnan & Robert Morris
Measures real DNS traffic to show that caching absorbs most load even with low time-to-live values, but that a small share of misbehaving clients generates a disproportionate share of failed lookups.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2002
How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time
Stuart Staniford, Vern Paxson & Nicholas Weaver
Models how fast a well-engineered worm could spread across the whole internet, arguing existing defences could not react in time and that automated countermeasures were the only feasible response.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2003
Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent
Bram Cohen
Argues a tit-for-tat exchange of pieces between peers, rather than altruism, is what keeps a swarm functioning even when every peer acts purely in its own interest.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
Paper2004
Democratizing Content Publication with Coral
Michael J. Freedman, Eric Freudenthal & David Mazières
Shows a self-organising peer-to-peer network of caches can give any web publisher the load-shedding benefit of a commercial content delivery network without paying for one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeIntermediate
In order written
1974 – 2016- 1974A Protocol for Packet Network IntercommunicationVinton G. Cerf & Robert E. Kahn
- 1981Internet ProtocolJon Postel
- 1981Transmission Control ProtocolJon Postel
- 1984End-to-End Arguments in System DesignJerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed & David D. Clark
- 1987Domain Names - Concepts and FacilitiesPaul Mockapetris
- 1987Domain Names - Implementation and SpecificationPaul Mockapetris
- 1988The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet ProtocolsDavid D. Clark
- 1988Congestion Avoidance and ControlVan Jacobson
- 1989Information Management: A ProposalTim Berners-Lee
- 1989Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol SuiteSteven M. Bellovin
- 1993Random Early Detection Gateways for Congestion AvoidanceSally Floyd & Van Jacobson
- 1994TCP Vegas: New Techniques for Congestion Detection and AvoidanceLawrence S. Brakmo, Sean W. O'Malley & Larry L. Peterson
- 1995A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)Yakov Rekhter & Tony Li
- 1996Computer Networks: A Systems ApproachLarry L. Peterson & Bruce S. Davie
- 1996It's the Latency, StupidStuart Cheshire
- 1996Analysis of the SSL 3.0 ProtocolDavid Wagner & Bruce Schneier
- 1997A Comparison of Mechanisms for Improving TCP Performance over Wireless LinksHari Balakrishnan, Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Srinivasan Seshan & Randy H. Katz
- 1998OSPF Version 2John Moy
- 1999Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1Roy Fielding et al.
- 2000Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software ArchitecturesRoy Thomas Fielding
- 2000Delayed Internet Routing ConvergenceCraig Labovitz, Ajay Ahuja, Abha Bose & Farnam Jahanian
- 2001DNS Performance and the Effectiveness of CachingJaeyeon Jung, Emil Sit, Hari Balakrishnan & Robert Morris
- 2001Inferring Internet Denial-of-Service ActivityDavid Moore, Geoffrey M. Voelker & Stefan Savage
- 2001Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer SystemsAntony Rowstron & Peter Druschel
- 2002How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare TimeStuart Staniford, Vern Paxson & Nicholas Weaver
- 2002Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR MetricPetar Maymounkov & David Mazières
- 2003Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrentBram Cohen
- 2003Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup Protocol for Internet ApplicationsIon Stoica, Robert Morris, David Liben-Nowell, David R. Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, Frans Dabek & Hari Balakrishnan
- 2004Democratizing Content Publication with CoralMichael J. Freedman, Eric Freudenthal & David Mazières
- 2005Wireless CommunicationsAndrea Goldsmith
- 2008OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus NetworksNick McKeown et al.
- 2010The Akamai NetworkErik Nygren, Ramesh K. Sitaraman & Jennifer Sun
- 2013The Tail at ScaleJeffrey Dean & Luiz André Barroso
- 2016BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion ControlNeal Cardwell et al.