OK, I want to know if there is any tutorial on here or that someone could link me to outside that would be informative to a complete newbie in the security area. I have looked up a wealth of information since hearing of RATs and looking up all of the information that I could find on trojans and types of hacking etc... Basically I have heard a million and one new terms and I want something to tie everything together and teach me what the heck is going on in the whole process of computer communications.... I do not know what terms to even use in a search engine. I have heard alot of packet sniffers and ip scanning and well it is like greek to me so where do I begin to even understand what all of this stuff is, means, and how it works?

I am very inquisitive so just knowing what a port scanner does is not what I am after. I want to know the hows and whys of the entire process and if I have to get down to binary code to do so then by all means.... I mean I had an online program run a port scanner on me because it is suppose to tell me if I have security issues but I want to know how it does its job. I also had a friend trying to teach me how to go into a cmd prompt and type netstat there to see if someone actually had connected to me through that stupid sub7 program. It amazes me to say the least. Now I want to know what I was actually doing in both those instances.

I dabble in everything computer. I learned to build, rebuild, fix hardware and software, build websites, and more. Now I am interested in learning how they tick from the inside out. On one of my many searches I found a tutorial on about.com about IP Networking which seems to be a good starting place if I could decipher all of the technical jargon and foreign terms enough to reconstruct sentences that I actually understand with attention deficit disorder!
Perhaps I could find IP networking for dummies? LMAO

So basically I want to start at the very beginning with quarks and leptons of how computers communicate with one another. Unfortunately I have a hard time concentrating to read so it has to be written in mostly lay terms with definitions because that article on about.com was written for computer programming grad students or something.

I apologize in advance if I ramble. I should have been in bed four hours ago. But if anyone can push me in the right direction or has the patience to teach me the basics, please ignore my delerium and reply. I am not always having manic fits over learning new things.... Sometimes I even SEEM sane.