Bartee has enlisted the talents of a number of experts in the field of networking to assemble a book of interesting and useful topics covering up-to-date networking technology. The book is particularly strong in areas of interest to communication equipment designers, with comprehensive coverage of transmission media, signaling techniques, modems, multiplexers, and error control. A full chapter is devoted to each of the most popular local area network technologies--PBX, broadband, and baseband--and another chapter covers LAN standards, centering around IEEE 802. There is also a chapter on carriers and regulation, and a study of security issues with an introduction on the applications of encryption. The book makes a good reference for all these topics, both as a tutorial and as a discussion of state-of-the-art technology for practitioners.

The book is far weaker in higher-level networking concepts, specifically those involving protocols at the transport layer and above, and provides little more than token coverage of wide area networking topics. Packet switching is mentioned only in passing in the chapter on PBX LANs, and transport protocols are mentioned very briefly in the protocol chapter, with little or no reference to specific protocols (e.g., ISO’s TP or the Arpanet’s TCP). Also not to be found are discussions of datagram protocols, host-to-host flow control and error control, routing, sequencing, fragmentation, and reassembly. There is no mention of the most popular vendor-specific protocol suites such as IBM’s SNA or Digital Equipment’s DECnet, and there is no discussion of application-level protocols. These problems are exacerbated by the lack of a reference list in the protocol chapter. In general, this book is not a suitable reference on protocols above the link layer.

In isolation, each chapter is reasonably well organized, but the book as a whole suffers from some of the typical coordination problems of multiple authors. Although far better than books containing collections or reprints of independently written reports, there are problems of inappropriate repetition and uneven levels of detail that reflect the bias and interests of the individual contributors. For example, security is inexplicably covered in the chapter on broadband local area networks, even though more complete coverage appears in the chapter on security; the PBX chapter discusses the ISO protocol model more thoroughly than the chapter on protocols; and there is an in-depth discussion of operating system security that is interesting but sheds little light on network security issues. The lengthy PBX chapter is itself a minicourse in networking, covering many of the topics in the other chapters. The error control chapter is a veritable treatise on the topic with 49 references.

The field of networking is so large that no one book can be expected to cover all topics to a reasonable degree of depth. Despite the uneven treatment and occasional duplication among chapters, the book is a valuable reference on the physical, electrical, and low-level protocol issues of digital communications and the latest in communications technology. The book’s major flaw is its title and jacket, which promise much more than one book can deliver. If targeted to the right audience, perhaps retitled “Digital Communications Technology,” it should fully satisfy the reader’s expectations.