Summary

In this chapter, we examined the primary characteristics network engineers identified as necessary to make networks viable. We considered the trade-off of usability for routing hardware versus readability for humans when defining a standard syntax for network addressing. With that consideration in mind, we looked at how the work of the telecom engineers of previous generations contributed hugely to the solutions that were ultimately standardized on all modern networks today.

Within that context, we looked at how IP addresses are used by network hardware to locate resources, and how the DNS facilitates the more memorable, human-readable addressing schemes of URLs and URIs. We learned how those domain names are explicitly mapped to their underlying IP addresses by implementing a domain name server of our own, using the hosts file of our operating system. Using the sandbox of our self-contained DNS server, we explored the C# classes provided by the System.Net namespace to facilitate building syntactically correct URLs, and leveraging the DNS to lookup the underlying IP addresses of a given URL, or resolve requests to do the same.

With this foundation in place, we'll use the next chapter to explore the communication protocols that allow for data transmission from one host to another. We'll look at how a standardized model facilitates communication between entities, and take a close look at some of the most common protocols used in that communication.