Instructor Resources

We (Keith and Jim) have each been teaching computer networking for more than 30 years. Together, we bring more than 60 years of teaching experience to this text, during which time we have taught many thousands of students. We have also been active researchers in computer networking during this time. (In fact, Jim and Keith first met each other as master’s students in a computer networking course taught by Mischa Schwartz in 1979 at Columbia University.) We think all this gives us a good perspective on Teaching networking, and an appreciation for high-quality resources that can help an instructor in teaching a computer networking course.

Here are the resources that we think instructors may find useful, and where to find them:

• Powerpoint slides. Here are more than 800 Powerpoint slides covering all chapters in the book. They're highly animated (we highly recommend you invest in a clicker if you are going to project and teach with them live). They're available in native Powerpoint so you can edit, delete, and add your own slides.
• Wireshark Labs. Here are the these Wireshark labs, which allow students to run various network applications using their own computer, or in a lab, and observe network protocols "in action" -- interacting and exchanging messages with protocol entities executing elsewhere in the Internet. Thus, the students and her/his computer are an integral part of these "live" labs; students observe, and learn, by doing.
• LMS (learning management system) automatically-graded questions/answers. Here are password-protected Canvas/Blackboard/Moodle/D2L-compliant packages so instructors can import the questions/answers for questions that are suitable for knowledge checks, student review, quizzes and exams, and the Wireshark labs.
• Programming assignments. Here are skeleton code and instructions for the programming assignments (and the some) in our textbook: simple client/server programs, web programming, a Web server, a UDP pinger, an ICMP pinger, a traceroute client, an SMTP client, a proxy HTTP server, a video streaming client and server, a reliable data transfer protocol (RDT 3.0 in our book), and a distributed distance vector algorithm. Password-protected solutions (are also available.
• Solutions. Instructors can contact our publisher to get solutions to end-of-chapter problems in the text, the Wireshark labs, and programming assignments.
• Interactive problems (with solutions). Here are end-of-chapter exercises where students (or you as instructor) are presented with an exercise whose solution can then be displayed. Each of the exercises is similar to an end-of-chapter problem in the text. Most importantly, students can keep generating new instances of each exercise (and hopefully solving each one!) until they've mastered the material. As instructors, we've used this to generate homework and exam problems (and solutions!).
• Interactive animations. Beyond the animations in our Powerpoint slides, we’ve developed interactive animations of a number of key networking ideas. Animations are a great way to visualize networking concepts, and the interactivity engages students - allowing them to explore these concepts that evolve and over space and time. Many instructors have told us that these interactions are effective classroom tools for bringing home key concepts. You can find our interactive animations here on our publisher's Companion website for the 8th edition of our book.
• "Retired" material. There is only so much material that one can put into a book of digestible size. As the field of networking has evolved, we've added new material to our textbook and "retired" old material. The "retired" material includes in-depth treatment of  multicast, SNMP-based network management and ASN.1 (although SNMP is also covered briefly in chapter 5 of the 8th edition), FTP, quality-of-service, datagram segmentation/reassembly, Mobile IP, and more. Instructors can contact our publisher for this material.