What are some simple resources for learning details of mesh networking?

I'm interested in building a mesh network over web sockets (for learning purposes), and am wondering about pathing / routing.

I've done a fair amount of googling on the topic, but my searches seem to be either too high level, or too specific to tcp/UDP or wireless networks.

I'm wondering if anyone has resources where I could learn to build a non fully connected mesh network that'll optimize paths based on some heuristics (such as quickest response time, or smallest number of hops, or both).

Thanks!