The TCP/IP Guide
[Page 40,41]

Introduction To the TCP/IP Guide | TCP/IP指南概述

As I sit here writing this introductory material a few weeks before finishing off a multi-year project culminating in this TCP/IP Guide, I reflect on how funny life can be. Prior to a few years ago, I never really thought of myself as a writer. I have no training as an author, and my interests have always been in computers. I always assumed that I would end up in a technical job, such as computer programming or hardware design.

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Perhaps ironically, then, it was my interest in personal computers that led to my writing The PC Guide in 1997. After I put the first version of that site online, I received many compliments on its usefulness. This didn‘t surprise me, since the material was of course designed to be useful. :-) What shocked me were all the comments I received about how people appreciated my writing. They said they found my material easy to understand, and some said they had even read through textbooks but never understood the concepts they explained until they encountered my site. I discovered that I perhaps I had a talent I had never before considered; more, I realized that it felt good to dissect a difficult technical subject and help people understand it.

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In early 2001 I decided that I wanted to embark on a new writing project to go along with the PC materials I had written in The PC Guide. I felt then, as I do now, that the future of information technology lies not so much in bigger and faster computers, but in better ways of exchanging information between them. I wanted to know more about networking and internetworking. So, I decided to create a Networking Guide to complement my PC Guide. I thought that this would take about six months.

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Remember what I said above about life being funny? :-) Well, as soon as I embarked on my project to create a Networking Guide, I realized that I had opened a virtual Pandora‘s Box. I had never realized just how large a topic networking was; there were literally hundreds of different protocols, technologies, algorithms, concepts and devices to learn about. These were all interconnected in a myriad of ways, and it was hard to explain how one protocol or technology worked without first explaining another one. The amount of complexity was amazing.

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To make matters worse, I found that it was very hard to find information about networks that really explained how everything worked. This seemed like an opportunity to me -- I decided that since so many people felt I did a good job explaining PC technology, that I should take a crack at networking. Once I accepted that it would take more than six months, I figured I should plan on up to two years to get this writing project completed. Well... life is even funnier than I imagined. :-) Fast forward from early 2001 to August 2003, and I find myself at my desk, looking over my writing project. I realize that I have been at this now for two-and-a-half years, yet due to my desire to cover as much as possible, I have at least a year‘s more work to go.

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