“Computer Networking : Principles, Protocols and Practice”

Complementary textbook to Saylor Academy’s “Computer Communications and Networks” (CS402)

Original textbook © October 31, 2011 by Olivier Bonaventure, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license made possible by funding from The Saylor Foundation’s Open Textbook Challenge in order to be incorporated into Saylor’s collection of open courses available at: http://www.saylor.org.

Print $29.95 USD, 282 pages, B&W

ISBN: 978-1-365-18583-0

Free PDF  Color, 282 pages, 8.6 MB

This open textbook aims to fill the gap between the open-source implementations and the open-source network specifications by providing a detailed but pedagogical description of the key principles that guide the operation of the Internet. The book is released under a creative commons licence. Such an open-source license is motivated by two reasons. The first is that we hope that this will allow many students to use the book to learn computer networks. The second is that I hope that other teachers will reuse, adapt and improve it. Time will tell if it is possible to build a community of contributors to improve and develop the book further. As a starting point, the first release contains all the material for a one-semester first upper undergraduate or a graduate networking course.

Table of Contents
1 Preface
2 Introduction
2.1 Services and protocols
2.2 The reference models
2.3 Organisation of the book
3 The application Layer
3.1 Principles
3.2 Application-level protocols
3.3 Writing simple networked applications
4 The transport layer
4.1 Principles of a reliable transport protocol
4.2 The User Datagram Protocol
4.3 The Transmission Control Protocol
5 The network layer
5.1 Principles
5.2 Internet Protocol
5.3 Routing in IP networks
6 The datalink layer and the Local Area Networks
6.1 Principles
6.2 Medium Access Control
6.3 Datalink layer technologies
7 Glossary
8 Bibliography