Networking self-teaching guide: OSI, TCP/IP, LANs, MANs, WANs, implementation, management, and maintenance

The tremendous growth of local area networks (LANs) into the organizational,corporate, and home networks in the last 20 years has shown that there is aneed for individuals with networking experience, and that need will remainfor a long time coming. The U.S. Department of Labor forecasts an increase of58 percent in the network and system support job market by 2016. With thatgrowth comes opportunities for individuals with networking knowledge tosecure their future.There are very few instances where a business is run without a networkof some sort. Retail environments maintain inventory, report income, transferpersonnel information, and many other functions are handled within aLAN. LAN-to-LANcommunication, secure tunneling, encryption and authentication,and many other functions are now handled by specific nodes andapplication programs that are part of the network.