Modern society is witnessing an amazing growth of networks--technological networks such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, Skype, and BitTorrent; social networks such as Facebook and Twitter; organizational networks; networks of business relationships among companies; and even naturally existing networks such as those found in biological systems.

This book is about networks in general, but is radically different from what we are used to seeing in traditional networking textbooks. Previous books, heavily influenced by the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layering principle, commonly treat networks as “organizations” that simply move bits around; they contain detailed descriptions of the OSI layers, but they are sometimes so detailed that the reader may have difficulty understanding how and why something works.

Chiang takes a fresh new look at the networking discipline and addresses many of the issues that have arisen during the spread of networks such as the web and Facebook. Half of the book treats the network as a graph and explores many of its features in a graph-theoretic way. The author does not intend to replace traditional networking books, but wants to enhance them in a way that encompasses the new discipline of “network science.”

The book is organized into 20 chapters. Each chapter introduces and answers one question, which appears as the chapter title. The chapters can be grouped into two categories, one consisting of chapters 3 to 10 on complex network theory and practice (including centralities, communities, robustness, influences, and small worlds), and the other consisting of chapters 1 to 2 and 11 to 20 about more traditional notions such as routing and billing. (This grouping can also be discovered by applying community-finding algorithms to the graph in Figure 0.3!)

Chapter 1 introduces basic cellular technology, and chapter 2 discusses auctions. Chapter 3 explores spectral centrality, particularly the way Google ranks web pages. Chapters 4 and 5 are about recommendations, while chapter 6 covers voting and rank fusion. Chapters 7 and 8 describe influence maximization, viral marketing, graph-theoretic centralities, and community-finding algorithms.

Chapter 9 turns to small-world networks. Chapter 10 discusses network robustness and vulnerability. Chapters 11 and 12 deal with pricing issues, and chapter 13 introduces routing algorithms. Chapter 14 investigates congestion control, and chapters 15, 16, and 17 examine content distribution for peer-to-peer networks, cloud systems, and video delivery, respectively. Finally, the last three chapters, 18, 19, and 20, consider effective and efficient wireless access to Wi-Fi and 4G cellular networks.

The style of this book is rather unique. It deploys three pedagogical principles: just in time, bridge theory and practice, and the book as a network. All three are quite effective teaching approaches. Moreover, each chapter is centered on a single question, for which the author initially provides a simple answer, which is later elaborated. This novel approach also diverges from the style of traditional coursebooks, which tend to flood the reader with too many algorithms and details that are rarely used in real networks. Chiang manages to avoid information overload by using examples from well-known real-world services and technologies, making it easy to relate theory to practice.

The book could be used in advanced undergraduate courses or in a post-graduate course on networking. Parts of it could also be used in courses involving complex network analysis or social networking. In fact, I taught a course on the theory and practice of complex networks based on the material covered in chapters 3 to 10 of the book. I particularly like the exercises in each chapter, and the fact that the book only references a handful of the most significant bibliographic entries at the end of each chapter.

Overall, the book is unique in that it masterfully combines the networking and network science disciplines in a single volume.

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