Patterns in Network Architecture

Chapter 2. Protocol Elements

A good engineer is a lazy degenerate. He prefers degenerate cases to special cases and will sit around (thinking) until he finds a simple solution, rather than immediately launch into a brute force approach.

In other words, the role of an architect is to use the tools he has to make things simple. (Anyone can make things more complicated!)

Introduction

We are now ready to begin our exploration of network architecture. The philosophy is mostly behind us, and we can now get down to the part everyone wants to talk about. But remember, we are doing the “algebra” first. We’re trying to keep as close to first principles and independent of implementation dependencies as we can—not because implementations are bad, but because ...