There was an old Samba book, from around the 1.0 days, that I read in 1997 which really made SMB click for me. Something about it's concise summaries of how browser elections and all worked, including how to configure Samba to work with all of it, demystified and brought together SMB networking. This really helped me career-wise as a sysadmin/troubleshooter in the days before we called things DevOps.

I tossed out the book a few years ago, and now I can't find a photo of its cover on Google Books or Images. IIRC it was sort of beige and blue, very typical for the time.