In Soviet Rus^H^H Most large corps have a dirty tricks dept, but in Capitalist USA, dirty tricks dept has FB #NetNeutrality #SaveTheInternet
FB is going all out to promote it's rebranded Internet.org initiative (now named Free Basics) to capture and lock in poor user on the platform. Since it's first attempt was thwarted, they have now brought out their dirty tricks department to "influence" or (rather misinform - a better word to describe the situation) Indian citizens. It has bought out front-page ads on popular newspapers, hoarding on trafficked roads and misleading ads on FB and youtube to do a sneaky campaign to mislead people to support the initiative.
Reading the RFCs for popular protocols is also a good start. Several of the RFCs also document many years of learning from operating networks. A good place to start is the RFC index - http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index2.html
I have been using Pandas and R for sometime now. I found Pandas is a little rough and fragile around the edges (for example, it was really hard to figure out how to get the median of a distribution in a dataframe as compared to R - fairly basic stuff really). Things do not quite work they way you want them. As for R inspite of the arcane syntax, the quality and number of packages, the help and the IDE (rstudio) is really good.
I am one of the organisers of headstart.There is a tweetup planned as well in case you guys are interested. Mail me - vinayak at headstart dawt in, in case you need any help from the organisers.
The book itself can be downloaded at https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/