[anaphor]

To be clear, it doesn't look like this is written any different from the actual RFC, just formatted and organized more nicely.

For actually understanding the RFCs, I've found it useful to crack open wireshark and then look at an actual TLS connection, and then cross reference the RFC to figure out what's going on. It makes everything more concrete in my opinion.

[tialaramex]

"The Illustrated TLS 1.3 Connection" https://tls13.ulfheim.net/ does this in web page form which saves you the effort to go make a connection and try to puzzle it out as an introduction, but your process is fine too -- especially when debugging a concrete problem.

[mcpherrinm]

If you want to augment that website, the captures used to generate it are available, so you can reference them in Wireshark as wekk https://github.com/syncsynchalt/illustrated-tls13/tree/maste...

[baby]

Author here. It includes errata, hides paragraphs that are not relevant with TLS 1.3, has nicer diagrams, and has videos going throug (a few) sections.