Every now and then I read some of the early RFCs to remind myself of how nice it is today, and yet how much sheer fun it must have been to craft some of the protocols, so I recommend those as extra reading material - no need to read specific ones in sequence, just search for them as topics arise.

Having lived through the original yellow-coax Ethernet years and filled out actual site registrations with the infamous "ICBM Address" field, there is a lot that I can directly relate to.