It presents a broad view of the techniques to connect computers together. The book gives an excellent introduction to all these issues. The first edition of this book, published in 1992, has been a best-seller and acclaimed as a classic on the issue. Since then, tremendous progress has been made in internetworking technology. Traditional companies are feeling pressure from new start-ups in the networking arena.
More people are eager to learn about networking.
It is great to see a new edition of Interconnections published at this time. The second edition is not simply an update, but a competent rewrite of most chapters, with a few exceptional chapters remaining largely unchanged. This new edition places more emphasis on networking designs and covers issues not found in the first edition, such as hubs, fast packet forwarding, autoconfiguration, multicasting and protocol design folklore. Given a problem, the author doesn't simply list a well-accepted solution, but often provides several alternatives. This helps reveal the differences, advantages and weaknesses of various solutions.