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Title: The professor is crazy
Review: Anyone trying to learn about networking in this very expensive tome of a book, gets not only the material, they will get a piece of Tanenbaum's mind on the way. Not saying that is inappropriate, but when you have so much material to cover, adding endless snipes and comments at everyone from standards organizations, corporations and standards writers, to name a few, this is so not necessary.Tanenbaum offers you reasonably understandable explanations, but every two or three pages he gets back on the podium and blabbers out of control. What you get are hundreds of wasted pages, full of opinions and not of facts.There are plenty of other books, opinion-free and much better written, such as Douglas Comer's TCP/IP book and James Kurose's excellent 'Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet'. Spare yourself the wasted time and anguish. Get a better book. The fact that many professors use this book is just a sign of how lazy they are finding a better book.
