Networking and protocols is the under-the-hood layer most engineers skip until something breaks in production. The courses cover TCP/IP, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC), TLS handshakes, DNS internals, and the application-layer protocols that show up in modern systems: WebSockets, gRPC, MQTT, GraphQL transports.
The skill that compounds is being able to read a packet capture, understand what each layer is doing, and debug performance problems where the application code is fine but the network isn't. Tools — Wireshark, tcpdump, mtr, dig, openssl s_client — show up in every course at this level.