Cambridge University Press this month has released a new book by Mung Chiang titled Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers. Driven by twenty real-world questions — from how Google figures out what to charge for ads to why Skype and BitTorrent don’t cost you a cent — this book pulls back the curtain on the Internet and explains the hidden guts of our networked lives.
The book quickly became the Number 1 Bestseller both in engineering and in networking on Amazon when it was released; at one point it ranked 322 of all books.
In other news, today marks the start of Chiang’s Coursera class, “Networks: Friends, Money and Bytes.” An article by Daily Princetonian‘s Rebecca Zhang says that Chiang is encouraging his 40,000 Coursera students to write blog posts and contribute to what he said he hopes will become an archival-quality wiki. In the process, Zhang says, Chiang intends to crowd-source the writing of a companion textbook based on the wiki contributions.
The Prince story offers a lot more on Chiang’s game plan for the Coursera class and also talks about two other online Princeton Engineering courses: David Wentzlaff‘s on computer architecture and the algorithms course by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.
:: :: ::
You must be logged in to post a comment.