You are probably wondering whether to refer to this book to understand more about TCP/IP or to read some other good books describing similar topics and containing the word TCP/IP in their titles. Let us explain to you what moved us to write another publication about the TCP/IP protocols on which the Internet is based.
Publications about the Internet are usually of two types:
- Publications involved with concrete operating systems (Microsoft Windows, UNIX, CISCO, etc.). The goal of such publications is to train readers in a particular TCP/IP implementation, while describing the main TCP/IP principles is only their secondary goal.
- Publications written for the academic environment. Even if their main goal is to describe the basic TCP/IP principles, they could be too tedious for many readers.
So we faced the task of creating a basic TCP/IP guide, independent from any concrete environment (for example, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, CISCO, etc.), emphasizing presentation of the text in a clear and apt form to readers so that they understand the main coherences. To explain the basic principles and coherences in the best way, we have used a lot of illustrations. These illustrations were not created by chance. We drew and constantly refined them according to the requirements from our countless TCP/IP courses. First we chalked them on a blackboard, next we drew them on a white blackboard, and finally we drew them in Microsoft Visio. It has been twenty years since we started teaching TCP/IP.
If you say to yourself that you will not pay for this book and will study TCP/IP directly from the Internet RFC standards, you have unknowingly found the next goal of this publication. Exploring the huge number of RFC standards takes a lot of time, and moreover their study is very difficult for a beginner. (The idea of someone reading international standards as a novel in his or her bed before sleep is funny.) So another goal of this publication is to equip readers with such knowledge that they would be able to study RFC by themselves after reading this book.
We, the authors, wish you good luck and hope that you get a lot of useful information by reading this publication.