Computer Networking A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet

Computer Networking A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet



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 textbook also contains material on application programming development - material not covered
in depth by any introductory computer networks textbook. (While there are books devoted to network
programming, e.g., the texts by Stevens, they are not introductory networking textbooks.) There are
several compelling reasons for including this material. First, anyone wanting to write a network
application must know about socket programming - the material is thus of great practical interest.
Second, early exposure to socket programming is valuable for pedagogical reasons as well - it allows
students to write actual network application-level programs and gain first-hand experience with many of
this issues involved in having multiple geographically distributed processes communicate. We present
the material on application programming in a Java context rather than a C context, because socket

programming in Java is simpler, and allows students to quickly see the forest through the trees.

Computer Networking A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet



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. The field of networking is now mature enough that a number of fundamentally important issues can be
identified. For example, in the transport layer, the fundamental issues include reliable communication
over an unreliable channel, connection establishment/teardown and handshaking, congestion and flow
control, and multiplexing. In the routing layer, two fundamentally important issues are how to find
``good'' paths between two routers, and how to deal with large, heterogeneous systems.

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