review of ISDN books

Hello together,

may be I'm writing twenty years too late, but here's
a short review of books on ISDN :D


Title: "ISDN and Broadband ISDN with Frame Relay and ATM",
fourth edition, by William Stallings

This book gives a good overview and still features protocol details.
It contains clearly represented diagrams f.e. what happens
when two TAs try to talk on the D channel at the same time.
If you only want to get one book, get this one.

There's a chapter about SS7 and as the book is from the year 1998,
it has interesting predictions for the future:
Everyone will soon carry around a VPC (=very personal computer).


---

Title: "ISDN Explained: Worldwide Network
      and Applications Technology (Wiley-BT Series)"
by John M. Griffiths

This book has a good balance of high level and low level workings.
It features a lot of historic information, from early
telegraphs to how fax transmission was invented and
how it is encoded. The concepts behind JPEG compression as used
by ISDN video calls or how PCM encoding works are also explained.

-> I wouldn't have imagined there was a working
fax system between Paris, London and Berlin in 1910.
Additionally there's some information how the first
rollout of ISDN in the UK was done in 1985.

---

German title: "ISDN. Die Technik. Schnittstellen, Protokolle,
             Dienste, Endsysteme. 3. Auflage."
by Andreas Kanbach and Andreas Körber

This book is very detailed on the protocol level,
most chapters are accompanied by SDL diagrams.
I wouldn't recommend it for someone to get basic
knowledge about the protocol.

---

German title: "Telekommunikation mit ISDN und ADSL:
              Teilnehmer, Technik, Protokolle"
by Horst Jansen

This is a high level book mostly intended for people
doing an apprenticeship. Many protocol details are left out.



tl;dr: Get "ISDN and Broadband ISDN with Frame Relay and ATM" if
you want to learn about the protocol. If the history of telephone
systems interests you, the second book above is also a good read.

Hopefully this short review is useful for someone else.
All of the four books were available for around 1 EUR each
and make a good read in the bath tub* (Harald Welte style).

Cheers,
Thomas

*) I actually read them on the train.
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