Computer Networks
Course Notes
Preface
These are course notes for Computer Networks, an undergraduate course on how the Internet works. They take a bottom-up approach: we will start with wires, voltages, and radio waves, and climb through the layers of the network stack to where applications like web browsers and email clients live.
The notes are meant to accompany the lectures, not replace them. They aim for the concepts — what each layer of the network exists to solve, why it works the way it does, what the alternatives looked like. The notes are not a reference manual. They do not cover every detail of every protocol. Instead, they focus on the big ideas and the most important protocols. The goal is to give you a mental model of how the Internet works, so you can understand new protocols as they come along.
Acknowledgements
These notes draw on standard networking textbooks — primarily Forouzan, Data Communications and Networking, with reference to Tanenbaum, Kurose & Ross, and Peterson & Davie. The prose is original; the topics and pedagogy are conventional.
This is a Quarto book.
To learn more about Quarto books visit https://quarto.org/docs/books.