Computer Networks and Internets (6th Edition)

I really like this little book as it fills in a niche in networking literature - that of providing a clear and quick picture of the main ideas and trends, great for cramming for a job interview or an exam. I recently bought many networking books,and although I primarily use the new editions of Steven's books "Unix Network Programming" + "Internetworking with TCP/IP" -recomended by the very best hackers around - this little book from Comer complements them nicely by giving a sweet overview without getting bogged down by technicalities as in a professional manual, and without getting lost in useless highlevel business stuff as in many other books. So I mainly use these three books in my practice: Stevens UNP+TCP/IPv1, with this one for a quick, focused and very useful read.Reasons for not getting 5 stars: The writing style is not the most elegant, but it is to-the-point, differently than many other networking books. The content is incomplete (mostly by design, to keep it short); it is just an overview. In some chapters, the level of overview works and is informative, but in others it is too shallow and can lead to misconceptions. For instance, in explaining UDP it doesn't say that many applications implement other communication features on top of it rather than using plain UDP, giving the false impression UDP can never be used for (semi-) reliable transfer.Despite this, the book does provide simple but useful semantic insight that is hard to extract from other books. For instance, quickly saying that UDP has a port and how it works is not very enlightening as a summary since you could look that up anywhere on the Web; On the other hand, saying that a port is sort of an abstraction for a process ID, as the author does, adds something quite valuable to a quick overview. If you use this book to complement others, then it works fine as it is; it is refreshing that chapters are really short, and more in-depth info should be kept elsewhere as to not clutter this much-needed and useful book.

Book arrived in excellent condition, really exceeded expectations. For a used book I would have advertised it as like-new condition.

Rental for school and arrived on time, clean book.

The book is not the best shape coming out of the box. I want this to be noted when I return the rental.

Very poor intro. If you are new to networking, this book will not help you to understand. I suggest using Google to research the subject over reading this textbook. When you have learned a fair amount then perhaps this book will be of use.The problem that I noticed was the half-hearted topic discussions. This book merely describes what networking is, though without examples for association. Seemingly halfway through the topic, it ends and moves to another topic. It rather feels like spacing out while on a walk and listening to someone speak without using adjectives, only to have them stop half way through.I enjoy reading textbooks. I did not enjoy this book of text.

Nice and quality book

Great shape

Great book