With optical fiber becoming increasingly prevalent as a transmission medium in building-size backbones--and sometimes all the way to the desktop--people who understand optical media are increasingly valuable. Special Edition: Using Optical Networks explains how several different varieties of optical networking technologies function. The emphasis is less on practical matters--products, procedures, and interaction with operating systems and applications--than on theory and protocols. As a result, readers get a good look at the physics that underlie, for instance, laser transmitters. The Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) is similarly explained, with plenty of frame diagrams and tables that explain the purpose of many individual bits. All of this will certainly not help you configure an optical backbone router, but it will help you distinguish one such product from another and assist you in deciding which better fits your network"s requirements.This book--for which authorial credit goes entirely to a training-materials company--is probably best suited to a student who seeks to understand optical data communications in detail. Its tone and carefully drawn illustrations are well suited to textbook duty, and its coverage is both detailed and accurate. Administrators, consultants, and network engineers likely will want to use this book to supplement vendors" information, using the authors" work to decode manufacturers" claims. --David Wall Topics covered: How lasers and fiber-optic transmission media communicate data across computer networks. The fundamentals of optical networking (particularly modulation and demodulation) get plenty of space, as do network topologies and the ideas behind wave division multiplexing (WDM). Of all optical protocols, SONET gets the deepest coverage.