"Tubes" - a journey to the center of the internet

We recently finished reading the book “Tubes” by Andrew Blum. This book talks about the internet and the things that make it work, the cover of the book even says that it’s “a journey to the center of the internet”. Most people, when asked how the internet works, would describe something to magic or just plainly say that it “just works”. This book is meant to show people what really happens on the internet that allows to do stuff such as search for cat videos or trade stocks without having to leave our home. This book fascinated me because I’m very interested in networking and the infrastructure that may be behind things like a Google search. In the past, I’ve been known to search for videos of data centers (such as This one showing a Google data center) so I would not be considered a beginner when it comes to knowledge of what the internet is and how it works. The most interesting thing I learned was when the author starts thinking in gigabytes and gigabits as individual bits, so one gigabyte is equal to about 1,000,000,000 bytes (if you use base-10 and not binary) or about 8,000,000,000 bits. If I had to pick a part of the book I didn’t like, it would most likely be several parts mainly because I knew the information already and was slightly bored with reading it and learning it again. Overall, there weren’t many terms that I didn’t know. Even when he was talking about the SFP+ cable/NIC, I was familiar with it because of my experience and the fact that I often frequent the /r/homelab subreddit, where people show off their home servers, datacenters, and networks. This book was very thorough and did not leave me with any questions after reading, and any questions could have been answered with a simple Google search. I would absolutely recommend this book to a friend, especially one that wants to know more about the internet and about how things like Google and Facebook can provide you with content from any place in the world. I think this book is significant mostly because it helps us computer science students realize that a lot of what computers do today is reliant on networking, and often networking through the internet. This book allows us to get an idea of what the internet is like without having to take a look at things like the OSI model and how the different networking equipment works with packets. This book was most likely chosen as a textbook because it gives us this general idea of how the internet works and let us get exposure to what some of us may end up working with as a career in the future. My interest in the internet and networks has probably stemmed from working with my home networking as well as being exposed to the makeup of a corporate network where I was an intern. At my internship, I got an idea of how the network was structured and where it came from, with its different subnetworks and physical locations. I was also exposed to networking and the internet through CyberPatriot, a national cyber defense competition. One of my roles my senior year was to be my teams networking specialist. We used Cisco’s “packet tracer” to build out virtual networks and troubleshoot problems in routers and switches while getting exposed to a real command line interface that was allowing us to make these changes in the scenario. Overall, this was a fun book to read, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about how the internet works.