Textbook of Internet and Information Technology

Description

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony and file sharing.
The origins of the Internet date back to research to enable time-sharing of computer resources and the development of packet switching in the 1960s. The Internet has no single centralised governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol Address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS) are directed by a maintainer organisation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardisation of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organisation of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
This book explores in depth the various aspects of this subject and related fields.