CHAPTER
1 What Is a Network?
At its core, a network is simply two (or more) connected computers. Computers can be connected with cables or telephone lines, or they can connect wirelessly with radio waves, fiber-optic lines, or even infrared signals. When computers are able to communicate, they can work together in a variety of ways: by sharing their resources with each other, by distributing the workload of a particular task, or by exchanging messages. Today, the most widely used network is the Internet. This book examines in detail how computers on a network communicate; what functions they perform; and how to go about building, operating, and maintaining them.
The original model for collaborative computing was to have a single large computer ...
Get Networking The Complete Reference, Third Edition, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
