Both ways of connecting devices have their advantages, but AP mode will avoid needing to deal with any confusion around subnets and will extend your wider home network with a mesh rather than ...
The 0 means eight 0 bits. There are "no" subnets, and up to 254 hosts can be addressed in this network (255 minus 1). In Example #2 above, the 224 reserves the three high-order bits of that byte ...