Your teaching staff
Instructor: Tracy Larrabee
Office Hour: Monday, 11:30-12:30 E2 337a
Teaching Assistants
Sections:
01A W 12:00PM-01:05PM E2 192
01D W 10:40AM-11:45AM JBE 372
Sections:
01B F 4:00AM-5:05PM E2 192
01C M 10:40PM-11:45aM PBSci 140
01E M 1:20PM-2:25PM E&MS B214
Group Tutor
Available for Small Group Tutoring
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Class Locations and dates
Class time: MWF 8:00-9:05
Class location: Jack Baskin Auditorium (JBE 101)
Date and time of final exam: Monday, December 5, 4:00-7:00
Class resources
- Check your grades on this webpage
- Our classes will be recorded (showing whatever goes through the projector plus my voice)
- Our class text is The TCP/IP Guide by Charles M. Kozierok, Fifth Edition.
- You can read this online for free.
- You can buy it at amazon.com (but I wouldn't).
- You might also consider several Networking Sections of Wikipedia as our class text.
- We will use a few sections of Khan Academy
- You are going to become very familiar with XKCD because your instructor loves it
- Several other sites of interest as we move through our time together
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What we will Cover
We are going to talk about the Internet, how it works, a bit of its history, and its affects on our society. We will start by talking about the underpinnings of communication: information transfer. Then we will become a bit more abstract and talk about how local networks work, then we will talk more and more abstractly. Throughout our time together we will talk about our digital age and how it affects us: how to be good "netizens" and how to protect ourselves on the Web. You will be encouraged to contribute your own thoughts and opinions to our understanding.
I will update our required readings as we go. To start with, I've only put in the readings for the beginnings of our discussions.
Assignments and quizzes
Your grade will be 30% from the weekly quizzes, and 20% from the regular labs, which should largely cover the quiz material. The labs are all online, and you will not need to turn in paper--you will just click the appropriate page. You won't get lab credit if you don't do the lab before Thursday class time. The remainder of the grade will come from the final, which will always contain material covered on the quizzes and labs with the possibility of a few other explicitely listed topics that I couldn't fit into the labs or quizzes.
It is very important to prepare for the quizzes by doing the appropriate "action items" and reading the listed readings for that quiz. Make sure you keep up with the Required Readings. Be aware that keeping up with the forum postings is a requirement of the class.
There are no makeup quizzes in this class! However, your grade will come from your best 7 quizzes, so that should cover the odd family event or work emergency that causes you to miss a couple of quizzes.
Communications
Please feel free to tell either the professor or the TA about any comments or suggestions you might have about how to improve the class. The best way to do this is by electronic mail, If you want to communicate anything to either of us anonymously, this is a good way to do it. You are always welcome to broadcast your opinions by using the webforum.
Disability Resource Center Student Accomodations
I welcome DRC students. Make sure you talk to me at the beginning of the quarter about your needs. As a note, I far prefer your emailing me a PDF of your DRC form instead of giving me a piece of paper.
Cheating
I hate to talk about cheating, because I like to assume there will be none, but the School of Engineering says I must: If a TA finds or I find conclusive evidence that you have cheated on a quiz or exam, you will fail that quiz or exam. It will not be possible to pass this course with a grade of 0 on the final exam. You should know that if you have been officially charged with cheating, and the provost has ruled that you have cheated, you get a black mark on your record: this could lead to either suspension or expulsion from this university.
To receive credit for a weekly quiz, you must sit in one of the installed seats of the lecture hall, and you must put the names of your right and left neighbor on the top of your quiz page (put something like "end of row" if there is no one on one side). After you turn in your test, you must leave the lecture hall immediately, and if you have forgotten your backpack or other materials, you may not retrieve them until class time is over. You may not talk to anyone during the test time but the instructor or one of the TAs. Violations of this rule will result in a quiz score of zero on the part of the person doing the talking.
Just as something to keep in mind, you will have an assigned seat for the final exam. Don't grow too dependent on sitting with your friends during examinations.
This all sounds ominous, but honestly, it is just so we all know that everyone is on a level playing field.
This is a list of references that I have collected that cover interesting networking things. Reading these things is totally optional. It's just here as a reference. Feel free to suggest new items for this list.
- The Internet Book, by Douglas E. Comer, Fourth Edition Prentice Hall
- (Deeper, wider coverage) Data and Computer Communications, by William Stallings, th Edition Prentice Hall
- How The Internet Works, by Preston Gralla, Seventh Edition QUE
- Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, by Larry L. Peterson & Bruce S. Davie, 3rd Edition Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
- Computer Networks, by Andrew Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall, Third Edition.
- Communication Networks: A First Course, by Jean Walrand, 2nd Ed., McGraw-Hill 1998.
- An Engineering Approach to Computer Networks, by S. Keshav, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley 1998.
- Power Programming with RPC, by John Bloomer, O'Reilly & Associates, 1992.
- Data Networks, by Bertsekas and Gallager, Prentice Hall. (Queueing Theory, MAC Protocols)
- Data and Computer Communications, by Stallings, Macmillian. (Encoding/Decoding)
- The Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Sockets: C Version, by M. Donahoo and K. Calvert, Morgan Kaufman Publishers. (Socket Programming)
- Unix Network Programming, by R. Stevens, Prentice Hall. (Socket Programming)