[mrmuagi]

I'd largely echo your sentiment, but luckily our professor had a hands-on attitude. This involved actually coding things that used those concepts. We had to implement a non-recursive DNS resolver and a FTP server. Reading the RFCs and chewing out something that worked (mostly) was real fun.

[audiolion]

Same here, we did examine headers and learn about the layers of networking, but we were also given the link to https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1035.txt and told to implement a DNS resolver in C. We also did a peer-to-peer client. You learn a lot more by implementing it.

[arawde]

I did the exact same projects in my 3rd-year networking class