I’m way down toward the bottom of the learning curve as compared with you but I’ve seen a lot of good things about their products and I recently purchased some hardware and am getting familiar with AirOS. Question - are there any good basic books/tutorials on networking stuff? Most of what I see is incredibly dense.
That seems to be the case. You might try a local community college for some basic network engineering courses. That'd be a good start nowadays, I think. What I know about network engineering comes from years of doing it. And reading those dense and convoluted manuals. Try cruising the Cisco site for a good example. You'l lalso find that most of the real power in device configuration occurs at the command line. Even though outfits like HP and Cisco offer nice, friendly web interfaces, the real work occurs at the CLI. I'm convinced thatit takes a special mindset to operate comfortably and efficinetly in those environments. Some have it, some don't.