I am curious, what is everyone's preferred book on CN? The only one I have read is Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross. When learning CN for the first time, I like their approach of beginning with the application layer and moving towards the physical layer. Their figures are also quite intuitive.
Jim Kurose and his co-author made a lot of material related to their book available online during the pandemic, including video lectures and some interactive problems (https://gaia.cs.umass.edu/kurose_ross/lectures.php).
As an aside, I was briefly in contact with him about using some of his course materials in a networks class I teach and he could not have been more helpful, seems like a very nice man.
Preferred book depend on why you are learning networks. TCP/IP Illustrated is still one of the best books about networks for software developers and SRE (though some chapters have little practical relevance today and can be skipped). But a network engineer would need a different book. As well a CS researcher.
This is a early 90's classic which describes the "complete" Internet as it existed at that time. The unique thing with this book is that it brings all the different components together thus giving you a overall picture. A lot of things have changed since then (mainly in application layer protocols) but much of the core protocols and infrastructure are still relevant. Reading this alongside more recent architectural books will give you better insight into the Internet and Networking in general.
> The photo is of mahogany leaves, presumably Swietenia mahagoni. The original image was taken by Homer Edward Price and placed at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mahogany-leaves_(560... under a Creative Commons license; the image as used here has been cropped.