I'm going to defer the promised posting about the implications of the online content of some of the Pearson books for now, in part because I'm going to be getting evaluation copies of some Morgan-Kaufman books and they have online content as well, best to go through both sets of terms and conditions and think about what they mean first. In the meantime, here's the Syllabus from this past spring - one task will be to compare the syllabus with the content of each book to compare coverage.
- Introduction to Concepts & History of Data Networks
- Protocol Layering, OSI and ARPANet reference models
- Client/Server model, Socket concepts and Socket programming
- using SSH
- Introduction to Information Theory, Compression and Error Detection
- Layer 1 & 2 - The Physical Network
- Layer 3 & 4 - Transport - IP, TCP and friends
- Queuing Theory
- Network devices
- Routing Protocols
- Dynamic Host Control Protocol - DHCP
- Domain Name Service - DNS
- Network Time Protocol - NTP
- Resource Identifiers - URIs and URLs
- Document Transport - FTP & HTTP
- EMail
- Network abuse
- Encryption & Security
- Digital Certificates
- Diffie-Hellman
- SSL/TLS
- IPSec
- DNSSEC
- Authentication - AAA
- Firewalls
- ASN.1
- SNMP
- LDAP
- peer-to-peer networks - BitTorrent, BitCoin