Telecommunications: A Beginner's Guide

I just started to read this book. Very good book...I have few books on TCP/IP... and Telephone Infrastructure..If you want to know more about Telephone networking, and protocols...look no further...

It is idle time for understanding a management will allow you to accustom to a developing area of telecommunications quickly. Written by skilled experts of company Hill Associates - the leading company on preparation of technical experts in the field of telecommunications, this book contains the technical information necessary for understanding and application of key technologies.

If you only can read one book on the subject, this is it. Written by experts in the field of computer networking and telco engineers it gives clear explanation of POTS infrastructure and data networking fundamentals, including the internet architecture. A lot of pages are devoted to "dying" technologies, such as X.25, ATM, and frame relay. Hot topics such as TCP/IP and Ethernet don't get enough coverage in my opinion. Even so, the book deserves 5 stars because even though it may not have everything, it does cover a lot and it does it well and with some sense of humor. There is no "filler" in this book. Besides, other books on the subject are ether too light (Dodd and Golenievsky), too technical (Freeman and Minoli) or too wordy and biased towards telco point of view (Bates and Horak) I must say I liked Horak's "Communications systems and networks" too -- it has a lot of complimentary and interesting details, historical notes and is written in a warm and loving style. I recommend you to read it before Hill's book if you are really interested in telecommunications.