Jim Kurose photo

Prof. Jim Kurose
College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
With Keith Ross, I am the co-author of the textbook, Computer Networking: a Top Down Approach (Pearson), now in its 7th edition. Since the publication of the first edition 16 years ago, the book has been adopted at many hundreds of colleges and universities, translated into 14 languages, and used by more than half a million students and practitioners worldwide. We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response. Our publisher's page for the 7th edition of our book is here; the Amazon page is here (7th edition; 6th edition).

There are a number of resources that we make freely available to the community (students, teachers, and readers):

  • Powerpoint slides. We make the original powerpoint available so you can modify/adapt them to your needs, and take advantage of the animations throughout.
  • Wireshark labs. An ancient Chinese proverb says "Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand." Your understanding of networking can be greatly deepened by "seeing protocols in action" - using your own computer to cause protocols to take action and exchange messages. These Wirelshark labs allows you to capture, observe and study the consequences of these message exchanges and actions taken by protocols operating on your computer and on the "live" Internet.
  • Interactive problems. Here, you'll find selected end-of-chapter exercises where you'll be presented with an exercise whose solution can then be displayed (hopefully after you've solved the exercise yourself!). You can keep generating new instances of each exercise (and hopefully solving each one!) until you've mastered the material.
  • Interactive book. Back in the 1990's, we both imagined our textbook would only be available as an interactive, online textbook. Seven (printed) editions later, we're still waiting for that to happen! But we do think it will eventually happen. Here is an interactive version of the first chapter of the 6th edition.