Chapter 3. Building a Network: It All Starts with a PlanWhat You Will Learn After reading this chapter, you should be able to
Let's face it: Without a good plan, most things that involve more than a couple of people are doomed for failure. There are even many popular sayings about how you need to plan, such as "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail." Networks would notcould notwork today unless all the networking vendors followed the same set of plans, or standards. Networking standards define a set of rules that must be followed by anyone who creates networking products, including cables, hardware, and software. When you follow these standards, the products should work together. This chapter describes several of the most popular standards and explains some of the benefits of using standards for networking. |