I first encountered academic papers on Compositional Network Architecture by Dr. Zave and Dr. Rexford in 2021, and it immediately caught my attention as a viable framework for building and analyzing networks. The core ideas are simple yet powerful and flexible enough to explain how the modern Internet functions. It provides the perfect level of abstraction for understanding computer networks.

This book challenges the fundamentals of the traditional 5 to 7-layer model (who’s counting anyway?) and proposes an elegant architecture that not only explains modern networks but also opens up new ways of thinking about designing and building them. The ideas are truly groundbreaking (if you know, you know!).

To help you build confidence in this new approach to networks, the book includes many thoughtful and well-crafted examples from various networking domains, demonstrating how a few simple concepts can explain them all. Getting abstractions right is hard, and this book excels in doing just that.

I highly recommend the book to anyone involved with computer networks—whether you are an academic or a graduate student looking for new ways to solve problems and teach networking, or an industry practitioner aiming to develop new technologies and solutions. And for anyone who wants to finally make sense of how the Internet actually works!

—Salman Saghafi, review on Amazon Books