How to Eat an Elephant, TCP/IP Style

How to Eat an Elephant, TCP/IP Style

The old question that many of you have probably heard is "How do you eat an elephant?" Well, that's a difficult task, indeed, until you know the simple answer: "One bite at a time."

If you've made it this far into the book, in some respects, you're taking the first bites of eating the network elephantfiguratively speaking, of course. To aid in your learning, the TCP/IP networking model helps you eator at least digestthe TCP/IP network model by segmenting the types of protocols and standards into layers. Each layer of a networking model represents a general category of protocol. So, you can characterize each protocol as belonging to a particular layer to help keep things organized in your head. Figure 3-9 shows the TCP/IP networking model's layers.