Optical Networking: A Beginner's Guide

Rating:
Summary: Author's conversational style works!
Review: I am not going to give a long winded review. I just wanted to take a few minutes and express my gratitude to this author by reviewing his text. I am a programmer turned sales weasel! I needed a book that provided a good grounding in this field. I was blessed to find Bob Elsenpeter's text. Why? He has an intuitive approach. So many author's lose me due to style. Here is a perfect example of Bob's style. On page 104 Bob explains that Ethernet is ubiquitus but NOT that efficient due to collision avoidance requirements - and uses a maximum of 37% of raw wire speed. Bob goes on to decribe the advantages of ATM. Then Bob writes "If ATM is so much better than other network protocols, why aren't all networks running it?" (The answer, for those of you that care, is tolerance for latency.) But my point is that Bob intuitively understands exactly what his students are wondering. Which by itself is not so unique. However, what is unique is that Bob ACKNOWLEDGES his reader's thoughts more often than not. Thank you Bob for having such acute empathy. Don't stop writing!