Systems Approach

As Bruce and I get ready to ship the seventh edition of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach to the publisher, we’re double checking for consistency.

After two newsletter issues on the role of AI in education, I was hoping to pick a non-AI topic this week, but AI headlines dominated the media so thoroughly that it was impossible to tune out.

Bruce gave his report of the SIGCOMM Education Workshop in his last post.

Last week I took part in the SIGCOMM 2026 Education Workshop, provocatively titled “Networking Education in the Age of AI”.

Bruce and I are (almost) always happy to see comments on our posts.

Since opening up our draft of the 7th edition of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach for comments, we have not yet been inundated with feedback, but we did get a very helpful comment about our perspective on network operations, a subject to which we have

Now that a draft of the new edition of our textbook is online, it seems fair to revisit a guarantee I made about it when we started the project: that 7E would be no longer than the previous edition.

A few weeks ago, Larry and I independently received the same advice from two different sources: take a look at Media Over QUIC for your next edition.

One of the factors weighing on us as we think about ways our textbook needs to change is the relationship between the Internet and the cloud.

It has been a few years since a colleague first suggested to me that writing textbooks was no longer worthwhile when everyone could get their information from large language models (LLMs).

Bruce and I seem to be on a “language matters” kick recently, debating proper use of switch vs router and obsessing over the precise meaning of virtualization.

Last week I was working on yet another chapter for our new edition, on the topic of Virtual Networks.