So uncomfortably true!

I recall spending a (large) number of weeks struggling through Elementary Stochastic Calculus, which had an incredibly misleading sticker on the cover proclaiming:-

“This book is suitable for the reader without a deep mathematical background.”

Totally OK way of doing it. You basically manually implemented the protocol APIPA uses to allocate 169.254 addresses.

In addition to the excellent https://sci-hub.se suggestion…

I can find the paper for free 90% of the time by googling the authors and visiting their personal page on their university’s website.

It’s pretty close already. I forget where I cribbed the technique from, but I embed python functions into my scripts very often…

E.g. see here