Computer networking for systems programmers Book

This was such a boring book. So much so that I would discourage anyone from picking ip up (or studying Computer Networking for that matter). First let me point out the characteristics that I liked most, so that I won't come across as a nuisance, and that prevented me from giving a lower rating


- At anyone's reach
- Very comprehensive prose, as far as the topics that the authors chose to cover are concerned (indeed, I felt much was left over)

Now comes my critique: this book feels aimed at a five-year old audience! Paragraphs feel like a watered-down, wordy mass of text -- this gives clarity, but is boring as hell to read! I expected (if not demanded from a Computer Science course) more formalism, technical sophistication than what I got from two authors afraid of overwhelming their audience. Computer networking basics are covered satisfactorily, but the watered-down, romanticized prose prevented the text from achieving a thicker conceptual density; a book style more appropriate for students with an interest in industry-related applications than on insight and true understanding. I once had a talk with a networking tutor at my university, and he told me part of his work dealt with Markov's chains and probabilistic modeling; I read many of the end-of-chapter interviews, and the interviewees often remarked a conceptually richer footing for computer networking that this book expressed. Why wasn't any of all this covered in this text?

Where did the cool stuff go? OK, I got a good grasp on the ISO/OSI stack -- up from HTTP, e-mail systems, P2P networks down to TCP congestion and flow control mechanisms, link-layer devices and LANs and basic network security notions (that was probably the part I liked most) but in the end I felt I was only acquiring passive knowledge with no reasoning involved. Is that a problem with this particular book? With computer networking? Worse yet, for computer science courses in general?

Additional flaws

- Ridiculously over-priced hard-cover copy (I borrowed one from the library)
- No solutions for end-of-chapter exercises (not even wireshark)
- Questionably ugly top-down approach. Makes one feel like applications deserve more attention than theoretical understanding