Networking Essentials
Difficulty: Easy | Topic #7
What to Learn
HTTP/HTTPS (request-response, headers, status codes), DNS resolution, TCP vs UDP, latency vs throughput tradeoffs, gRPC for internal services, connection pooling.
Resources
- Hello Interview: Networking Essentials ↗
- ByteByteGo: Top 8 Most Popular Network Protocols Explained ↗
- Hussein Nasser: The OSI Model by Example ↗
Covered by Problems
| Problem | Difficulty | Link |
|---|---|---|
| URL Shortener/Bitly | Easy | → |
| Messaging App (WhatsApp) | Medium | → |
| Web Crawler | Hard | → |
Key Concepts to Master
- HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3 (QUIC) and multiplexing
- TCP connection establishment (3-way handshake) and keep-alive
- DNS resolution chain (recursive vs authoritative)
- gRPC benefits over REST for internal services (protobuf, bidirectional streaming)
- Latency numbers every engineer should know