If you want dry and boring, do CompTIA and Cisco certs.

If you want fun, get into info sec and learn that way. Check out OWASP, Hackerone, Hack The Box, et al. These platforms will teach you about networking and security at the same time.

Neither is better. Depends on the person.

I recommend getting a VPS and playing around with all kinds of networking tools.

Don’t bother with the cert if it’s not your job, but at least look into CCNA Routing and Switching. There are tons of courses available, both in person and online, as well as numerous YouTube videos on the subject.

See if your local library or community college has an adult education center that provides a course. At some point, you will need to learn subnetting, which is just math, but practice makes perfect, and your life is easier if you have it committed to memory.

Proper written work is still one of the most effective ways to do this.

Start by replacing your ISP-provided router with something that runs OpenWrt and explore around.

Go for a book to gain the knowledge, examples: https://bookauthority.org/books/best-network-protocols-books

Check Gentoomen Library and anarcho-copy, both have a huge curated list of books on everything, including networking.

The reality is that you won't learn much just by reading, you need to try to debug stuff and eventually work in the area to truly learn.

But I am sure there are plenty of tutorials and video courses in various platforms where you can learn a bit on the topic. Coursera might be a good place to start as you can enroll for free to those courses if I am not wrong.

Computer Networking: Top down approach book is awesome honestly

You can use emulation to practise. Gns3 or packet tracer are example of visualising networking hardware to play out different ideas. Jeremy's it lab has plenty of cisco related videos to teach you.

This way you can fuck around without the wife getting angry she lost instagram access again and again and again.

Do you like dry reading? I do, and I started here http://intronetworks.cs.luc.edu/

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

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There is always the Network + book. I went through it in 2005, so no idea what the content is like nowadays though

Michael W. Lucas's "Networking for System Administrators" is a great resource: https://mwl.io/nonfiction/networking#n4sa

First the basics: the book "Computer Networks" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum

If you have read and understood it all, continue with https://www.openwrt.org/

Raspberry Pi + PiHole + PiVPN = Network Gateway Drug

Although, PiVPN is winding down so you might want to find something different instead. Setting up a regular Wireguard VPN isn't so bad, but it may be simpler to setup a Tailscale Tailnet.