By starting at the application-layer and working down to the protocol stack, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet provides a motivational treatment of important concepts for networking students. Based on the rationale that once a student understands the applications of networks they can understand the network services needed to support these applications, this book takes a "top-down" approach where students are first exposed to a concrete application and then drawn into some of the deeper issues of networking.
Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet focuses on the Internet as opposed to addressing it as just one of many computer network technologies. Students are enormously curious about what is "under the hood" of the Internet, creating an extremely motivational vehicle for teaching fundamental computer networking concepts.
This text features a comprehensive companion website which includes the entire text online. It allows for direct access to some of the best Internet sites relating to computer networks and Internet protocols. The website has many interactive features, including direct access to the Traceroute program, direct access to search engines for Internet Drafts, Java applets that animate difficult concepts, and direct streaming audio. Finally, the website makes it possible to update the material to keep up-to-date with this rapidly changing field.
Certain data-communication protocols hog the spotlight, but they all have a lot in common.
Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet explains the engineering problems inherent in communicating digital information from point to point. The top-down approach mentioned in the subtitle means the book starts at the top of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol stack--with the application layer--and works its way down through the other six layers until it reaches bare wire. The approach is definitely theoretical--don't look here for instructions on configuring Windows 2000 or a Cisco router--but it is relevant to reality and should help anyone who needs to understand networking as a programmer, system architect or even administration guru.
The treatment of the network layer, where routing takes place, is typical of the style overall. In discussing routing, authors Kurose and Ross explain (by way of lots of clear, definition-packed text) what routing protocols need to do: find the best route to a destination. They then present the mathematics that determine the best path, show some C code that implements those algorithms and illustrate the logic with excellent conceptual diagrams. Real-life implementations of the algorithms--including Internet Protocol (both IPv4 and IPv6) and several popular IP routing protocols--help you make the transition from pure theory to networking technologies. --David Wall
