[rhymin]

I'm studying networking and have about 10 months left before I get my degree in information technology. Most of my networking classes aren't for a couple months and I wanted to get a jump start on reading some books before that time. I bought "Networking all-in-one" for Dummies by a pretty good author named Doug Lowe and it covers the basics of many, many categories.

Are there any books that anyone with much more knowledge than me would recommend? It doesn't have to be super advanced, in fact, I would rather ease into different aspects of networking slowly without taking in too much information at once.

Also, I am going to download VMware and a couple operating systems (Windows Server 2008 R2 and some version of Linux) and play around with virtualization as well as getting myself familiar with the Windows Server OS. Does anyone have any other advice on how I can familiarize myself with other areas of networking such as virtualization?