Peter Lars Dordal wrote:This book is meant as a serious and more-or-less thorough text for an introductory college or graduate course in computer networks, carefully researched, with consistent notation and style, and complete with diagrams and exercises. My intent is to create a text that covers to a reasonable extent why the Internet is the way it is, to avoid the endless dreary focus on TLA’s (Three-Letter Acronyms), and to remain not too mathematical. For the last, I have avoided calculus, linear algebra, and, for that matter, quadratic terms (though some inequalities do sneak in at times). That said, the book includes a large number of back-of-the-envelope calculations – in settings as concrete as I could make them – illustrating various networking concepts. 

Overall, I tried to find a happy medium between practical matters and underlying principles. My goal has been to create a book that is useful to a broad audience, including those interested in network management, in high-performance networking, in software development, or just in how the Internet is put together.