In today's world, you'd have to work pretty hard these days to find someone who would argue, when
you say that our computers have become invaluable to us personally and professionally, you know, that
our society has become highly dependent on the resources they offer around on sharing them with each
other.
The ability to communicate with others completely hinges on the capacity to create and maintain solid,
dependable networks.
And those vitally important networks come in all shapes and sizes ranging from small and simple to humongous
and super complicated, but whatever the flavor, they all need to be maintained properly.
And to do that, well, we need to understand networking basics.
So let us start by defining what is a network.
Well, first things first.
The dictionary defines the word network as a group or a system of interconnected people or things.
Similarly, in the computer world, then the network means two or more connected computers that can
share resources such as data and applications, office machines and Internet connection or a combination
of these.
Now you can see an image on the screen, it shows a really basic network made up of only two computers
connected.
They share resources such as file and even a printer hooked up to one of the hosts.
These two hosts talk to each other using a computer language called as binary code, which consists
of ones and zeros in a specific order that describes exactly what they want to see.
So what really is networking?
Well, networking is changing the way we do business and the way we live.
Business decisions have to be made more quickly.
And the decision makers require immediate access to information.
So why do we have to wait for a week to arrive over the report from Germany through postman or courier
service, whereas it could just arrive in mail mailbox instantaneously through computer networks, as
you can see on the screen?
We do not need to wait for a bank to transfer physical money, whether we could just transfer the money
within the fraction of seconds.
So now let's dive into technical terms, network is a set of devices connected by communication links,
and a node can be a computer printer or any other device which is capable of sending and receiving data
generated by other nodes on the network.
A well-defined network must be able to meet a certain criteria.
Most important of these are performance, reliability and security.
So to be specific with computer technology, network is a connection of two or more computers that are
linked to each other in order to carry out tasks such as printing, sharing, data, exchange of electronic
media, transferring files, copying and pasting or whatever to computers can actually do so if we try
to correlate networking with our day to day life.
We can see that a group of friends are sharing ideas between the members of the group or discussing
our various issues is also a network, right?
It is a network of people.
So network is basically defined by one factor.
That is transfer of information from one point to another or from node to Donald.