I'm absolutely with you on deepening knowledge from books rather than googling. Of course, no one book has it all, but one you might check out is - "TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols, 2nd Edition" from Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series. It's a great series, by the way, worth checking every book out.

Computer Networks, Tanenbaum is a standard introductory textbook that's gone through multiple editions over nearly thirty years. It might not be for you, but it's proably a good place to start figuring out what is for you because a lot of what you encounter will be paraphrasing parts of it or using it's abstractions.

And because it's been used so heavily and printed so long, used older editions abound. Which are good enough to get started because TCP/IP and Ethernet and lots of other things are still mostly the same with new stuff layered on top.

Very very worthwhile investment of your time.

I dived into the topic two years ago using Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networking-Top-Down-Approach...)

As someone with about ten years experience in web-dev, but no formal CS education, I found the difficulty level to be just right.

Routing TCP/IP, Vols. 1 and 2 are basically the networking bible. You may not necessarily want to go that far into networking, though!

This is the correct answer.

Here are a couple recommendations.

Interconnections - Radia Perlman. This is a good introduction to bridging and routing.

Networking Algorithmics - George Varghese. This has a lot of interesting content about removing bottlenecks from network devices. I would appreciate recommendations for a newer book with similar content.

Not a book but PG's essays are great sources http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

Many of them touch on subjects like network effects on the startup scene

I would recommend Ed Harmoush's materials in https://www.practicalnetworking.net/

I’ve heard good things about https://nostarch.com/tcpip.htm