Review of networked life: 20 questions and answers by Mung Chiang

1 Overview Everyone—or at least anyone who uses the Internet—is impacted daily by networking technologies, whether through their use by companies such as Google, Netflix, or Facebook or in the Internet backbone itself. Scratching the surface of these technologies just a little bit, one finds great ideas from theoretical computer science underlying many of them. These applications thus provide a great " hook " by which to interest students in the field of computer science in general, or theoretical computer science in particular. Networked Life uses these technologies that we are all familiar with to motivate the material it covers. As a textbook, it is unusual in several respects. First, it is organized around questions—20, to be exact—rather by " answers. " That is to say, each of the book's 20 chapters focuses on a question that any curious person might raise (e.g., " How does traffic get through the Internet? "), and develops the necessary background and mathematics needed to address that question. As a consequence, material on, say, game theory is not developed in one place but is instead spread across several chapters throughout the book. The book is also written in a conversational style; moreover, each chapter is divided into sections containing a short answer to the relevant question, a longer answer, and then advanced material. Whether this works or not depends on the reader and (for this reader, at least) on the question being addressed as well. The following provides a taste of some of the questions addressed in thus book, with additional comments in parentheses about what technical material each one corresponds to: • How does a distributed system of wireless transmitters/receivers agree on a set of power levels that will allow them all to communicate without too much interference? (Linear algebra; game theory and linear programming are introduced as well though not really used.) • How do auctions work? (Game theory, algorithmic mechanism design.) • How are webpages ranked? (The Pagerank algorithm, linear algebra.) • How are networks formed, and what effects does this have? Generative graph models, the " small-world " phenomenon, scale-free networks.) • How are services priced, and how should they be priced? (Game theory, microeconomics.)