I'm a programmer trying to fill a big hole in my understanding of networking basics. I've been reading a good book (Networking Bible by Sosinki) but I have been finding that there is a lot of "assumed" information contained, where terms/concepts are thrown at the reader without a proper introduction to them.

I understand that a "route" is a path through a network. But I am struggling with visualizing some routing-based concepts. Namely:

1. How do routes actually manifest themselves in the hardware? Are they just a list of IP addresses that get computed at the network layer, and then executed by the transport?
2. What kind of data exists in a so-caleld routing table? Is a routing-table just the mechanism for holding these lists of IP address (read above)?
3. What are the performance pros/cons for having a static route, as opposed to a dynamic route?