The TCP 3-Way Handshake is the ritual that every TCP connection performs before any real data flows. It’s a tiny three-step conversation — SYN, SYN-ACK, ACK — but it’s the reason the internet feels reliable, ordered, and predictable.

This handshake lets a client and server agree on sequence numbers, confirm each other’s presence, and prepare a clean channel for communication. Without it, TCP wouldn’t be connection-oriented; it would be chaos in packet form.

In this episode, we explore:

• What SYN, ACK, SYN-ACK, and FIN actually do

• How the handshake establishes sequence numbers

• Why TCP needs a negotiation phase before data transfer

• The exact steps of the 3-way handshake

• A real-world example showing the packet exchange

• How connections are gracefully terminated

• Why this handshake makes TCP reliable while UDP stays connectionless

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