1. Introduction to networks

Computers are powerful tools. So much so, that they now control many aspects of our daily lives, from how car traffic passes through a city, to how we educate children and how we run businesses.

Over the last thirty years, the greatest improvements to the power of computers have come from our ability to connect them together - to network them.

If one computer is powerful, how much better would it be to share resources between them, to have specialised computers talk to one another and compare data?

In this section, we will describe different types of computer networks, from the very small to the very large, and discussing the benefits and drawbacks of these networks to the user.