ISBN0073250325

I bought Behrouz's data Communications and Networking (4th ed) book for self-study purpose. I found it to be an excellent book. It is not wordy but still very detailed. It has a lot of figures and diagrams to explain the concepts. You can hardly find a page without graphics. The concepts are clearly explained with minimal use of math. You can download very nice power points from publisher's website. If you want to learn about networking, then this is a book worth every penny spent on it. I highly recommend it.

If you're looking for a book which includes a heavy introduction to data communication, then you should consider this book.

If you are hunting more info on networking, I'd suggest you look elsewhere. All topics are introductary and not conclusive enough to be anything but theory knowledge.

Beware on differenet versions as well, as there exists a localized copy of this book for every country in the world, all which vary content.

I conducted a full book research for an undergraduate networking class I'll be teaching, and this volume quickly rose to the top, and stayed there. It may not be perfect for a strongly math-centric or engineering-based curriculum, but it's perfect for IT/IS and general CS. It is the textbook I wish I had when I took my first undergraduate and even graduate level networking class in college. This is also a book that I actually enjoy reading and flipping through--a prerequisite for students. There is no doubt for me that this book will stand the test of time as a reference book for them through the coming years.

This book is well organized, well written, well researched, comprehensive, and is consistently high quality across the board (table of contents, end of chapter material, glossary, index, illustrations, figures, tables, callouts, boxes, etc.). Please, I challenge you to refer me to a book with a better glossary, or as up-to-date content as MT-RJ connectors (with a Figure, no less!) The website for the book is also top-notch! Students can take a chapter quiz, have it electronically graded, and submit the results via email to themselves and to me. Guess what we're going to do at the end of class? ;-)

The layout and color scheme of the book is surprisingly conducive to learning, something you can't say about every textbook. There is more than enough stuff for a good professor to be able to fill a basic networking class.

Probably the only thing I found lacking, and this is for professors, not readers or students, was a more thorough pedagogical discussion of proposed curriculum paths and sequences for professors to consider. Most will go their own way, but it is helpful up front to know why the author(s) organized the way they did, included what they did (vs. specific model curricula), and what the ramifications might be of moving things around, etc. Personally, I'll be de-emphasizing chapters 6, 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 22, 24, and 29--FWIW! But that's just me... I also would have liked to have seen, somewhere (even if it was online), a practical primer for students, on how to use Hyperterm, for example, and links to some free utilities for network monitoring, etc. If that was there, I haven't ran across it yet. Oh, and possibly a discussion of certification paths, for those that are interested. But then again, professors shouldn't be handed everything on a platter. So those are minor criticisms.

This was an easy textbook to adopt, and I am quite sure the students will greatly benefit from the work Behrouz and his technical review team did on this great text. I am not always easily impressed, but in this case I was.