Overview. This "course" is being informally taught by Jim to a group of industry professionals. It provides an introduction to fundamental concepts in the design and implementation of computer networks, their protocols, and applications. Topics to be covered include: overview of network architectures, applications, network programming interfaces (e.g., sockets), transport, congestion, the network data plane (packet forwarding, addressing) and control plane (routing algorithms,software defined networks, network management), link-layer protocols, local area networks and data center networks, wireless networks, and a bit of network security. Examples will be drawn primarily from the Internet (e.g., TCP, UDP, and IP) protocol suite.
This course is typically as taught (but without the exams or homeworks!) as a junior/senior level introduction computer networking course taken by CS, EE, and sometimes business majors. Parts of this course have also been used for a general education course on "Our Networked World," for non-majors.
Having worked (just a bit) and taught (quite a bit) in industry, I'm appreciative of the fact that you have more-than-fulltime jobs, many of you have families, and have an already overfull life. So this is meant to be low key, interesting and enjoyable. I'm happy to tailor this to whatever works best for you.
The schedule for our course is here.
Instructor. Professor Jim Kurose
College of Information and Computer Sciences
kurose@cs.umass.edu
Drop me an email whenever you want to chat, and we can set up a time to Zoom.
Group meeting time. Tu 8:00 - 9:00 AM PDT. This class, as envisioned, has both synchronous and and asynchronous components. We'll meet together "live" as a group on Tuesday mornings. "Lectures" have been pre-recorded and are available online here. The recorded lectures also have simple "knowledge checks" that will help you review a topic covered in that lecture.
Workload. Again, I'm very cognizant of pressures on your time. So this course is mostly reading, watching videos, and discussion. If you want to do homework problems or programming assignments, I'm happy to provide them. You might also want to try out the Wireshark Labs, which are easy and popular with students around the world.
Course Materials
- Textbook. Computing Networking: A Top Down Approach, 8th edition, J.F. Kurose & K.W. Ross, Pearson, 2020. Given the publisher's new model, you can't actually buy a copy of the 8th edition textbook, but instead can rent a copy here from Chegg. You can buy the eText through VitalSource or RedShelf. You can get by OK with a copy of the 7th edition (although I'd recommend the 8th edition), and we'll flag new/updated material between the 7th and 8th edition. You can read about these updates here. If you have trouble getting a book, just drop me an email.
- Recorded lectures. Pre-recorded lectures for the course are here.
- Powerpoint slides. The Powerpoint slides used for this class are here. I'd recommend that you download a copy and mark them up with your notes, as we go through the material. You can think of these as the "instructor's notes" for the material that we cover. I'd recommend that you go through them in Powerpoint (say rather than, or in addition to, PDF) since there are a lot of built-in animations.