Occasionally I'll get a nebulous question like "can you explain networking?" I struggle with answering this one. It's not that networking is too hard to explain. Few things are that hard. The real issue is that the topic is so vast, it's hard to know where to begin.

I first learned about networking while playing on a MUD as a child. There's precious little else that gets a pre-teen boy to learn something besides the promise of video games. If you can't be bothered to click the link, it's essentially a chat room that you can reprogram. Games like these used to be filled with hackers and aspiring hackers. I think you can guess which one I was. Still, folks took pity on me and showed me the ropes.