Take a Free Networking Class From Stanford

New submitter philip.levis writes "Nick McKeown and I are offering a free, online class on computer networking. We're professors of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford and are also co-teaching Stanford's networking course this quarter. The free, online class will run about six weeks and is intended to be accessible to people who don't program: the prerequisites are an understanding of probability, bits and bytes, and how computers lay out memory. Given how important the Internet is, we think a more accessible course on the principles and practice of computer networks could be a very valuable educational resource. I'm sure many Slashdot readers will already know much of what we'll cover, but for those who don't, here's an opportunity to learn!"

Comments

Re:IPv6

[rogueippacket]

I would agree with you if it were a 12 or 16 week course - but there is a lot to talk about in terms of the physical and data link layers and plain IPv4 before even addressing IPv6. Six weeks is barely enough time to provide a solid foundation there.

Re:Excellent idea, but...

[DamonHD]

Probability should be taught early on at school, not waiting for university!

Rgds

Damon

Do NOT skip layer 2.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I disagree. If you don't learn much of the layer 2 concepts, then you'll probably never learn anything about layer 2 troubleshooting. One time I had to work on a network where they had separate discontiguous VLANs that couldn't talk to one another. I remember a while back hearing about a major hospital whose network failed because their engineers didn't understand some of the more advanced layer 2 concepts. There are also issues such as implementing measures preventing some idiot from creating switching loops that STP can't detect, e.g. cascading some $10 switches they found at wal-mart which are creating a layer 2 broadcast storm that is bringing down an entire VLAN.

Troubleshooting isn't the only thing, you also won't understand layer 2 security, which has been exploited quite a bit lately. Some easy examples would be MAC flooding and MAC spoofing, to the more severe problems like VLAN hopping, and much more that I can't think of off of the top of my head.