Eugene Blanchard made his Introduction to Data Communications (also known as Introduction to Networking) available for free. The book covers a broad variety of topics such as RS-232, Ethernet, RF, TCP/IP and many other topics in its 63 chapters. This is a valuable reference and read for those just starting to understand networking and data communications as well as seasoned professionals in the field.
I’ve been looking for a good doc on RS232, unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be it. It seems to explain everything at a really high level. It doesn’t explain the exact handshaking processes. For example
RTS is asserted
CTS is asserted
data is sent
is what it says, but it would be nice to know if the handshaking is done every byte or every transmission and if CTS were deasserted if the transmission would stop, etc.
It seems woefully incomplete, but it’s a nice start.
is there a PDF download of this book. i hate it when they put into separate html pages.
The answer is it depends.
For everything you wanted to know about serial communications. I recommend “C Programmers guide to serial communications”
[Anonymous (IP: —.rivrw5.nsw.optusnet.com.au) ]
Use wget if you’re familiar with the command line, else use one of the GUI front-ends to retrieve it.
would be nice for the few of us who prefere hardcopy instead of staring in the monitor.
The book, btw, is beautiful. I am surprised that such an excellent textbook went PD!
Never used it before, but isn’t there a html to pdf convertor?
HTMLDOC
Thanks “A stranger”, but I think there is also a linux based program too.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/htmldoc?topic_id=87%2C154%2C8…
[i]It seems woefully incomplete, but it’s a nice start.[i]
Perhaps that’s why the word “Introduction” is in the title.
just a small errata:
PCI is said to be 32Bit@66Mhz, its still 32Bit@33Mhz (same as VLB) unless you have a not-so-cheap server motherboard.
Nice book, thanks for the hint!
If anyone’s interested in the TCP/IP protocol suite, I’d suggest them to have a look at another _very_ good book by IBM, “TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview”, available in PDF format here:
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/gg243…
(By the way, the book is being constantly updated, so it’s best to periodically get back to the site and download the most recent version.)
..it doesn’t explainvariable subnet masks. Can anyone make a guess why is it that authors shy away from discussing variable subnetting in detail, even in the fattest “most-complete” TCP/IP books? My guess: low IQ.
Variable subnetting is not trivial, but it’s very useful. I remember, years ago, having a friendly “fight” with the lead engineer from a system integrator company, on whether a certain variable-subnetted network configuration (on which we worked together) would work or not. I won that time, but it was almost a tossup.
forgot to specify
It is a nice gesture for him to open up his book, but it really isn’t a good introduction to data communications at all. A lot of it is either in the form of bullet points or is explained in a sentence or two. This might be a good way to review something for a test, but it is not good for people trying to learn the basics.
Computer Networks 4th Edition, for Andrew Tanenbaum is also a good resource for TCP/IP.
The information provided in the text is too general and superficial to be of more than limited usefulness to anyone that has any sort of technical expertise. The text could also use an editor to correct its colorful grammar.
Just for example, see the subject line.
Just some background, the book went public domain after approaching many “publishers”. The common response was similar to the responses here. It was too general, only an introduction. The book was written to be general and to be an introduction. This was determined by the lack of a good introductory book. Gilbert Held has an Introduction to Data Communication book which surprisingly follows my book. His book is well written and covers the same topics. The only improvement that I can see for his book is to reorganize it so that you are not jumping all over the book. I teach from his book quite successfully if I refer back to the 5 part data communication model.
All the books that were available when this book was written, during the middle to late 90s, made the assumption that you had a previous knowledge of data communications and or networking. It made it very difficult for the new learner to understand the technology when the texts would constantly refer or compare to other technologies. Ex. learning ethernet and refering to Token Ring or arcnet and vice versa. It was very frustrating for the first time learner.
Back to the publishers… Every publisher wanted me to rewrite the book specific to one protocol or technology such as ISDN or TCP/IP. Prentice Hall was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Their deal was for me to add 200 pages to a 300 page book, make an online data bank, and website which works out to about 1 years worth of work full-time. They also wanted full ownership of the copyright and if they decided that the book required a change or modification regardless of whether I agreed, then they could make the changes and charge me for the cost.And lastly they would forward me US$5,000 of future sales so that I could do this years worth of work. I told the VP of Prentice Hall in no uncertain terms what I thought of being bent over and screwed and said that I would rather give it away free then work with them. For some reason, he sounded surprised…
I haven’t editted it or corrected it for the last 5 years and its a low priority as I’ve gone on to other things (see my website). Yes there is information that is out dated or incorrect but “c’est la vie”..
I had it “published” at linuxdocs.org with a lot of hoopla about how they were going to do something with it and all they did was screw up the formatting and then add their names as editors with copyrighting the screwed up formatting. They wanted me to change formating from html to xml.
Originaly the book was written in Pagemaker and diagrams in CorelDraw. It took about 6 months to convert from those propriatory formats to html. At that time, CorelDraw didn’t support saving as jpg or gif images and pagemaker didn’t support html. Everything was saved as postscript then cut and pasted into html documents using lots of scripting. I did have a pdf file available but it was costing me $60-75 per month in download fees because it was so popular. I didn’t feel like paying others to use my free book so I canned it.
On the other hand, feel free to email me if you have any specific questions. I’ll try to answer them as time permits.