The authors give a detailed summary about the fundamentals and the historical background of digital communication. This includes an overview of the encoding principles and algorithms of textual information, audio information, as well as images, graphics, and video in the Internet. Furthermore the fundamentals of computer networking, digital security, and cryptography are covered. Thus, the book provides a well-founded access to communication technology of computer networks, the internet, and the WWW. Numerous pictures and images, a subject-index and a detailed list of historical personalities including a glossary for each chapter increase the practical benefit of this book that is well suited as well as for undergraduate students as for working practitioners.

Autorentext

Dr. sc. nat. Christoph Meinel (1954) is President and CEO of the Hasso-Plattner-Institut for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) and full professor (C4) for computer science at the University of Potsdam. His research field is Internet and Web Technologies and Systems. Beside he is a teacher at the HPI School of Design Thinking, a visiting professor at the Computer Science School of the Technical University of Beijing (China) and a research fellow of the interdisciplinary center SnT at the University of Luxembourg. Since 2008 he is program director of the HPIStanford Design Thinking Research Program. He is author or co-author of 10 text books and monographs and has published more than 350 per-reviewed scientific papers in highly recognised international scientific journals and conferences.

Harald Sack is Senior Researcher at the Hasso Plattner-Institute for IT-Systems Engineering (HPI) at the University of Potsdam. After graduating in computer science at the University of the Federal Forces Munich Campus in 1990, he worked as systems/network engineer and project manager in the signal intelligence corps of the German federal forces from 19901997. In 1997 he became an associated member of the graduate program 'mathematical optimization' at the University of Trier and graduated with a PhD thesis on formal verification in 2002. From 20022008 he did research and teaching as a postdoc at the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena and since 2007 he has a visiting position at the HPI, where he now is head of the research group 'semantic technologies'. His areas of research include multimedia retrieval, semantic web technologies, knowledge representations, machine learning and semantic enabled retrieval. Since 2008 he also serves as general secretary of the German IPv6 council.

Inhalt

Prologue.- Historical Overview.- Communication Fundamentals in Computer Networks.- Multimedia Data and Its Encoding.- Digital Security.- Epilogue.- List of Persons.- Abbreviations and Acronyms.- Image References.- Bibliography.- Index.