Book Title: Computer Networks Authors: Larry L.Peterson and Bruce S.Davie Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann The book Computer Networks, Fifth Edition: A Systems Approach is suitable for all sets of people including network administrator, application developer or a designer of network equipment to understand how modern networks and their applications are built. COMPUTER NETWORKS: a systems approach fifth edition written by Larry L. Peterson and Bruce S. Davie is one of the bestselling books on Computer Networks that teaches the key principles in networking with examples drawn from the real world of network and protocol design. Using the Internet as the primary example, the authors explain various protocols and networking technologies. Their systems-oriented approach encourages thinking about how individual network components fit into a larger, complex system of interactions. The book is organised into nine chapters as follows: The first chapter "Foundation" discusses what goes into network architecture, provides an introduction to protocol implementation issues, and defines the quantitative performance metrics that drive the network design. The second chapter "Getting Connected" describes the issues in link-level protocols including encoding, framing, and error detection. The most important currently used link technologies - Ethernet and Wireless has been described here. The third chapter "Internetworking" discusses the basic concepts of switching and routing. This chapter also deals with the Internet Protocol (IP), routing protocols and hardware, software approaches to build routers and switches. The fourth chapter "Advanced Internetworking" covers multi-area routing protocols, inter-domain routing and BGP, IP version 6, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and multicast. The fifth chapter "End-to-End protocols" describes both the Internet's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC) used to build client-server applications in detail. The sixth chapter "Congestion Control and Resource Allocation" introduces the mechanisms used to provide quality of service (QOS) in IP. This chapter also describes how congestion control works in TCP. The seventh chapter "End-to-End Data" covers XML and how MPEG video compression and MP3 audio compression work. This chapter describes how application data is encoded in network packets. The eighth chapter "Network Security" gives an overview of cryptographic tools, the problems of key distribution, and authentication techniques using both public and private keys. This chapter also discusses the building of secure systems using examples including Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Secure Shell (SSL), and the IP Security architecture (IPSEC). The ninth chapter "Applications" describes a sample of network applications and the protocols they use, including traditional applications like email and the Web, multimedia applications such as IP telephony and video streaming, and the overlay networks like peer-to-peer file sharing and content distribution networks. This book also contains a set of exercises of varying difficulty which ensure that the readers have mastered the material presented. The book has gone through five editions proves the popularity of the book both as a textbook for teaching computer networks as well as a reference book for networking professionals.