This new edition of Douglas Comer's book clearly indicate that networking courses are more and more taught at undergraduate level. The fifth edition of this book is an introductory book on computer networking and TCP/IP in particular. Douglas Comer choose to cover a large number of topics at an introductory level. The book uses a mixed approach. It first starts by describing internet trends and internet applications. Then, it spends 130 pages on the physical layer. This part does not require any specific electrical knowledge. The third part looks at local area networks (wired and wireless) and also covers switches and the basics of routing. Short simplified pseudocodes are presented for some algorithms. The fourth part is devoted to TCP/IP. It covers both IPv4 and IPv6 and briefly the routing protocols. Concerning TCP, it describes the basics of TCP but does not consider algorithms such as TCP's congestion control and the retransmission mechanisms implemented in recent TCP stacks. The last part of the book is a survey of various topics including Quality of Service, Voice over IP and security.

Surprisingly, and this is a very important drawback, the book does not contain any reference ! References in a textbook are important because they both show how existing work needs to be cited and furthermore they allow the reader to learn more about a given topic. It would have been very useful to add a reference section with the key papers or RFCs in each chapter. Without these references, the book appears to be of limited use in classes.

D. Comer, Computer Networks and Internets, fifth edition, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-504583-5, http://www.netbook.cs.purdue.edu/