[daveslash]

I hope this doesn't sound dismissive, because it's not meant to be, but invest some "recreational time" going down rabbit holes, such as watching various youtube videos, falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes, skimming RFCs, buying used books for cheap on Amazon, pet projects for learning purposes, etc... In hindsight, my Comp-Sci major was very academic. That is, course books and homework on networking used very formal language (almost mathematical notation), when what I really needed at that time was "plain English" explanations and real world examples. Basically, never stop being curious and reviewing the same topic through different lenses/perspectives/sources. Unfortunately, it can take some time for dispirate pieces of knowledge to coalesce into a comprehensive picture. I've also spent a lot of time learning about modern computing's origins, which lays out the road to how we got to today, which has been very helpful.

For Networking Specifically, always keep the OSI 7 Layer Model [1] in mind. The reason is that it's important that when you're learning about X, you stay focused on X without being bogged down with the details of Y. A great free networking resource is Beej's Guide to Network Programming [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model [2] https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/