Customer Reviews

High-Speed Networks and Internets: Performance and Quality of Service (2nd Edition)

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If you already have a full understanding of networks and the algorithms associated with it, this is a good reference, maybe.

however if you are looking to learn about these topics this is not the book for you.

it is poorly written, with horrible examples which leave you wondering what exactly he is trying to explain. he jumps from topic to topic, not explaining some terms till many pages later. even after reading the chapter, trying to apply the ideas to the questions at the end is sometimes frustrating.

again this is only for someone as a refresher, not for someone trying to learn about the topic for the first time.

I found this book mostly frustrating. Although it did contain some information that I've never encountered anywhere else (such as MPLS and diffserv), the writing style was so off-putting that it was hard to get through the material. The author seems to go out of his way, for example, to use the word "data" as a plural just to show off that he knows that data is a plural word. The sentence "the briefest of summaries if provided forthwith" pops up in the first chapter.

That said, I can't think of any competing book I could recommend that covers the same material. Unlike most every other networking book that's been published in the last 20 years or so, this book *doesn't* limit itself to TCP/IP, but covers frame relay and ATM and actually compares and contrasts the different approaches.

There's also sort of a "middle part" in chapters 7, 8 and 9 that cover probability, queuing theory and self-similarity. For the most part, these chapters are a waste of space, since they don't get into enough depth to cover the material and aren't really used much in the subsequent material.

Also, the exercises at the end of the chapters (all without answers and thus without any means of checking your work) generally can't be completed based on just the material in the chapter itself. In fact, I came across at least one exercise (the "chuck-a-luck" question in chapter 7) whose text was lifted verbatim from one of the chapter's references ("An Introduction to Probability" by Samuel Goldberg - which *does* include answers in the back of the book for self study).

So, although the author's research was impeccable, I have to say he really ought to have let somebody else do his writing for him.

If you want to learn about networks(theory) there is no one else better than William Stallings. Excellent book. All topics well covered especially the one on TCP/IP. A good reference book for a networking guy.Also the author takes you into the basics of socket programming but its only the basics.If you want to delve into this I suggest the one from Richard Stevens