ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

A comparison of textbooks about Internet technology

1996-07-19 10:07:08
A comparison of textbooks about Internet (TCP/IP) technology
------------------------------------------------------------

I am developing a technical university course about the Internet
application protocols. As part of this work, I have been looking at
suitable textbooks for such a course. Here is an overview of the
textbooks I have looked at and their suitability for my course.

I checked as follows:

Protocol fundamentals: I checked how good descriptions were given of
sliding windows and of caching.

Protocol descriptions: I checked this by looking at the description of
the DNS protocols.

Application protocols: I checked this by looking at the description of
SMTP and HTTP.

Scores given are my personal evaluation of how complete and easy-to-
understand descriptions were, given on a scale from 0-9, where 0 is
worst and 9 is best.

Author             Title          Publisher        No. of    Quality
                                                   Pages

Wilder, Floyd      A Guide to     Artech House       327     maybe
                   the TCP/IP     1993 ISBN 0-
                   Protocol       89006-693-0
                   Suite

Lynch, Daniel C. & Internet       Addison-Wesley     821     maybe
Rose, Marshall T.  System         ISBN 1993 0-201-
                   Handbook       56741-5

Comer, Douglas E.  Internetwork   Prentice Hall     1812     good
& Stevens, David   ing with       1996 ISBN 0-13-
L.                 TCP/IP         262148-7
                   Volume I,
                   II, III

Stevens, W.        TCP/IP         Addison-Wesley    1791     good
Richard, Wright,   Illustrated,   1994 ISBN 0-201-
Gary R.            Volume 1, 2    63346-9

Conclusion: None of the books are ideal for my course, since they are
very thick and contain a lot of material not needed for my course. Best
is probably to ask the publishers for permission to copy only certain
pages of the books for my course.

The two latter books above were best, but also thickest. Perhaps not
very surprisingly, none of the books gave any description at all of the
HTTP protocol.

For more information, see URL
http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/internet-textbook-inventory.pdf

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>