Customer Reviews

Business Data Communications, Fourth Edition

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This third edition is full of typos and even some errors that, in my opinion, would be devastating to a business student attempting to digest technical material.

I wouldn't have minded the tons of typos such as "a procedures" for "a procedure" and "port 12" instead of "port 2" and "ft/s" instead of "frames/s," but "increases" instead of "decreases" was too much to take at the end of an explanation of the relationship between bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.

My school will not be using this text next semester and my copy will be going in the trash at the end of this term. In my opinion, a third edition in this price range should not have so many errors and clumsily written explanations.

It is an excellent book to teach graduate courses. While the students find this book too dry and technical, at the end of the course they see themselves with the basic skills for this growing field. For the IS practitioner, the book is an ideal resource. It gives exactly the level of detail needed to understand projects related to data communication technology.

I have read the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions. I find the authors to progressively focus on new technology and issues of current interest. I recommend this book to someone wanting to learn fundamental concepts in data and TCP/IP communications.

A course I took earlier this year used this textbook, and I wasn't too fond of it. The book's explanations were very clinical, and other reviewers are correct in observing that it has many typographical errors (which are very frustrating when trying to solve mathematically inclined equations).

The professor deviated substantially from the text, supplying us with several real-world examples and more on the theory behind the examples given in the book. If he had not done that, I do not think I would have been able to learn the material from the book alone. Many of its explanations are too brief and lack depth or supporting examples.

If you are teaching an information systems course and intend to use this textbook, be prepared to supplement it with substantial cases or lose the interest and comprehension of your students.

I was very fascinated about this book and the way it brings a sometimes difficult to understand content to the reader in a funny and easy way. But I was angry about the problems and questions in the book and that there weren't any solutions available.
So more or less accidentally I came to the "Solutions CD" of the fourth edition. Take a look at amazon.de and lothar_ast here you can buy the book+CD for 73,90 Euro.

I was asked to teach a class using this book. Unfortunately, the book is over the heads of most of the students. It is not the best job of presenting the information either. None of the students like the book. I do not recommend it as a class textbook, but as a reference for someone who already is in the data comm field. It does have some good technical information, but is not presented in a way that you can read the book from cover to cover.

I am completing my MSIS degree. I was required to use this textbook for one of my classes. I felt the book was possibly appropriate for an engineering computer science program on a "how things work" level but a terrible waste of time for business students. If I want to buy a cell phone I don't care HOW the cell phone works. I only care that it DOES work, and that it is dependable, accurate, reliable, and cost effective. Stop putting the OSI model in these textbooks. Just teach TCP/IP because that's what is used. If you're going to put problems at the end of the chapters, provide solutions to the students. Otherwise, you're just wasting paper because nobody will ever use them. Why work on them if you don't have a solution to compare your answers to? I have spoken to nearly half the people in my class. All agree. This textbook was a terrible choice for our class in the business program. None of us feel we learned anything of value from studying from this book.

I sincerely hope our instructor and program director will find a different book to use for future classes.

One of the most prolific writers in the data communications texts, Mr. Stallings, did a good job. Some readers complained that it is too technical. But to understand data communications, you need to know the basic definitions and terminology. There is no short cut.

Why call it "Business Data Communications"? Because it is where you apply the infrastructure, then the company benefits. Especially in today's environment with so much data security, spyware, firewall, etc.

The book will be better, if it provides "hands-on" exercises to implement these strategies.

For someone that judges a book by its cover, I was more than unplesantly fooled. This book is not an easy read; I would estimate that you need at least a year of technical training to fully comprehend the concepts. Luckily I have that background. However, many of my classmates did not and the text book was too difficult for them. There are many helpful diagrams and figures...but they make absolutely no sense whatsoever (without the technical knowledge).

I bought this book for an online course on Network Communications which I took as a Computer Science major. This book is riddled with technical information and looks at things from an 'implementation cost' perspective (the case studies at the end of almost every chapter are good examples of this) which is good for Computer Information Systems (CIS) majors since they tend to focus more on the business aspect of the 'field'.

The majority of the chapters are easy reading (if you like reading technical info.). I found some of the problems at the end of some chapters to be quite challenging (which was a treat being the geek that I am). I've also used this book as reference for TCP/IP when doing low-level network programming.

Conclusion: if you're a CIS major or a business major focusing on IT, then I recommend this book for you.

I had to buy this book for school. It was ok, the professor mostly taught from this book rather than the other one we had.