Another technical book I read straight through like a novel, mostly out of pig-headed perverseness. I did work the exercises for the first five chapters, hoping this would better anchor the content and also fill in some of the engineering/physics gaps in my background. About halfway through, I again stepped back my involvement, deciding that watching someone mindlessly plug numbers into formulas was a waste of time, I gave up on even pretending to read the examples that are boxed off from the rest of the text.
It is not clear who this book is for. Some really basic math is spelled out in excruciating detail, but (on at least one occasion in which I stuck it out to reproduce the omitted work) half a page of calculation might be assumed to be either self-evident or otherwise not worth discussing. I was almost one hundred pages into text before realizing that "complex waveforms" meant "complicated", not "allowing for imaginary components".
But I learned some stuff, and I suppose that's all I can really ask for.
Scratch that, there's a lot more I could ask for from a book. Learning some stuff is just about the bare minimum.
Isolated comments follow.
In Chapter 7 ("Digital Communication Techniques"), in a section on oversampling, noise is referred to as "evil". Chapter 7 is also where I finally admitted to myself that the big ideas are interesting, but the implementation details are beyond me.
Like FM radio, cable television uses frequency division multiplexing.
I liked most of Chapter 11 (maybe it was the lack of circuit diagrams), but Section 11.7 on the Hamming code was just painful. Chapter 12 opens with the formula for how many links are required to connect every pair of nodes in a network, and this is followed immediately with the claim that the number of links increases "in proportion" to the number of nodes.
Section 12.2 on LAN hardware was good, very concrete.
Section 12.3 closes with the observation that Ethernet is Layers 1 and 2. Section 15.2 closes with an example transmission and how its components go up and down the OSI stack.
Section 14.3 points out that weather only affects some frequency ranges because those wavelengths are about the size of a raindrop.
Section 15.1 introduces the reader to two widely used internet browsers: Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. The edition I am reading was written in 2016.
Section 17.4 closes with an interesting couple paragraphs about how and where VSATs are used (lots of point-of-sale for retailers).
And let's end with some even more terse one-offs of things that it sounds like it would be cool to learn, but which I did not get from this book. In-phase and Quadrature signals were mentioned in Section 8.1, but QPSK is mentioned in Section 11.4. The piezoelectric effect where AC current causes a crystal to vibrate was mentioned in Section 8.2. The internet core gets a paragraph in Section 12.1; the same section briefly describes a Redundant Array of Independent Disks.
my favorite quote: "Networks of small cells overlay, or as some say underlay, the macro network to provide an overall boost not only in data speeds but also subscriber capacity."