CS625 Spring 2013
Course Information and Syllabus
Contact Information:
Perry Donham
pd@kidpub.com
Introduction
TC625 covers a wide range of networking topics. We'll start out with the fundamentals
of data communication and work our way up through basic Ethernet LANs to TCP/IP and
the Internet, to distributed applications and wireless networking. Although some of the
material can get a bit technical, we'll try to emphasize the business side of networking.
Materials
We'll be using Business Data Communications & Networking, 11th Edition by Fitzgerald /
Dennis / Durcikova for our primary text. If you'd like to look through additional
textbooks, Stallings is pretty good as is Tannenbaum…a bit more technical than Stallings.
We'll cover just about all of the chapters in the book as we work our way through the
network stack from bottom to top. I will also bring additional lecture material to most
classes, which I'll provide handouts for.
Course Site
Copies of the slide sets and other course-related material and information may be found
on our course web site, http://lms.bu.edu, which is an implementation of Blackboard.
You’ll need your BU login to get access to the page, and you should already be enrolled
on the site. There are quite a few features in Blackboard, and while we might not use all
of them, it’ll be fun to play around with.
Academic Conduct Code
The University and Metropolitan College take cheating very seriously. Cheating and
plagiarism will not be tolerated in any MET course. Cases will be referred to the Dean’s
office and may result in loss of credit for an exam or assignment or other disciplinary
action. The full text of the Student Academic Conduct Code may be found at
bu.edu/met/metropolitan_college_people/student/resources/conduct/code.html.
Contacting me
The best way to contact me is by email. You may also IM me at
kidpub.press@gmail.com. If you have any questions at all during the semester, please
feel free to ask.
Schedule
Week
Topic
Reading
Notes
1: Jan 13
Introduction
OSI Network model
Signal encoding
Generic LLC
Ch 1 - 3
Layer 1/2
2: Jan 27
Ethernet
Token Ring
FDDI
Switching
Ch 4
Layer 2 LLC/MAC
3: Feb 10
TCP/IP
Routing
DNS
Ch 5
Layer 3/4
4: Mar 3
Wireless networks
MIDTERM
Ch 6
5: Mar 17
Internet applications Ch 7, 8
Distributed
applications
6: Apr 7
Security
7: Apr 21
Final exam
Ch 10
SMTP, FTP, HTTP,
Application servers