I don't have good recommendations for a book, but I can recommend spending a few weeks implementing it. libpacp is probably the easiest way to send and receive raw ethernet frames, and you only need to implement ARP, IP, and TCP to have something not unlike telnet.

ARP and IP are fairly easy to implement, and TCP is as well as long as it doesn't need to be fast (e.g., live with a fixed and smallish window size, discard out-of-order packets, don't bother with selective ACK, etc).