Interesting networking magazines
During their studies, students learn the basics of networking. After one of maybe two networking courses, they know a very small subset of the networking field. This subset should allow them to continue learning new protocols, architectures and algorithms. However, finding information about these new techniques can be difficult. Here is a short list of magazines and journals that publish regularly interesting information about the evolution of the networking field.
A first source of information are the magazines. There are various trade press magazines that usually present new products and provide information on new commercial deployments. A networking student should not limit his/her networking knowledge to the information published in the trade press. Here is a subset of the magazines that I often try to read :
- the Internet Protocol Journal published by Cisco is a very useful and very interesting source of tutorial papers. Each issue usually contains articles about new Internet protocols written by an expert. The papers are easy to read and do not contain marketing information.
- the IETF Journal published by the Internet Society publishes short papers about the evolution of the protocols standardized by the IETF
These two magazines are freely available to anyone.
Scientific societies also publish magazines with networking content. These magazines are not available at the newsstand, but good university libraries should store them.
The IEEE publishes several magazines with some networking content :
- IEEE Network Magazine publishes tutorial papers in the broad networking field.
- IEEE Communications Magazine publishes tutorial articles on various topics of interest to telecommunication engineers, with sometime networking sections or articles
- IEEE Internet Computing Magazine publishes articles mainly on Internet-based applications with sometimes articles on lower layers
- IEEE Security and Privacy publishes articles on new advances in security and privacy in general. Some of the published articles are related to networking problems.
The ACM publishes various magazines and journals that cover most areas of Computer Science.
- Communications of the ACM is ACM’s main magazine. This magazine is an essential read for any computer scientist willing to track the evolution of his/her scientific field. It sometimes publishes networking articles. ACM Queue is a special section of the magazine that is devoted to more practically oriented articles. It has published very interesting networking articles and furthermore all content on ACM Queue is publicly available.
If you read other networking magazines that are of interest for networking students, let me know. I will cover networking conferences and networking journals in subsequent posts.