“We are telling the story of the Internet: Its technology, its architecture, and its evolution.” -systemsapproach.org
Since 1996, Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie’s‘ Computer Networks: A Systems Approach’ has been the go-to textbook for a comprehensive, end-to-end reference on how the Internet works.
Since the 5th edition, it has been open-sourced and made available free. The repository on Github says, “Our hope is that open sourcing this material will both make it widely available and serve as an attractor for new content: updating what’s already there, expanding it to cover new topics, and augmenting the text with additional teaching collateral.”
We were thrilled to see our work on Blockstack featured in the 6th and latest edition of the book. You can read about Blockstack’s decentralized design in the section titled “Perspective: Blockchain and a Decentralized Internet”. If you’re viewing the PDF version, this starts on page 412. This section can also be read in its entirety here on Github.
Preview:
“Probably without giving it much thought, users have invested enormous trust in the applications they use, especially those like Facebook and Google that not only store their personal photos and videos, but also manage their identity (i.e., provide Single Sign On for other web applications). This is troubling to many people, which has sparked interest in decentralized platforms, systems for which users do not have to trust a third-party. Such systems often build on top of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, not for its monetary value, but because cryptocurrency is itself based on a decentralized technology (called a blockchain) that no single organization controls. It’s easy to…” Read more.
Resources:
- SystemsApproach on Github
- PDF Version of the full book
- ePub Version of the full book
- Blockstack section
- Project website
About the authors: