What is Reddit's opinion of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The book Tubes has a very good history of this. It's been awhile since I read it, but as I recall a group of telecom executives, over lunch at Tortilla Factory, hammered out plans to interconnect their networks, creating a large switch in northern VA. For awhile the hardware was in a parking garage (I think in Tyson's Corner), but as the internet grew, a lot of infrastructure ended up in Ashburn because land was much cheaper. Being near a switch like this is good for data centers because it is cheaper to connect to the network and reduces latency

Great response, for those looking Andrew Blum has an interesting book Tubes which is basically a full book ELI5 if anyone is interested in reading more. It looks like it can be had on amazon used for about $2.

You may want to read this book

 

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A book actually called Tubes about the infrastructure of the Internet.

Very readable.

https://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Internet-Andrew-Blum/dp/0061994952

It strikes a nice balance of accessibility and technical details. It's not designed to prepare someone for a certification, for example, but everyone will learn something from it due to the breadth it covers.

I worked with a CCIE when I read it (was network/sys admin at the time). We talked about what I was reading in the book on one of our work road trips, and there were definitely things he wasn't aware of (such as the process of laying line across the ocean and why certain locations were selected as drops).

I think you can read it without any technical background in, say, how TCP/IP works, but you can also read it as a professional in the field. There's so much information there that it does such a stellar job of piecing it all together in a way I haven't seen presented before.

There are some review on Amazon that echo this: https://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Internet-Andrew-Blum/dp/0061994952

> This book appeals to two kinds of audiences: > > ** 1. If you don't know anything about the internet. This book is the best, most easy introduction to get. That's good, because it's also one of the only introductions that's not a textbook. You won't learn everything, because that's a lot of computer science algorithms, but you'll have the best overview from this book. The stories are good, but not excessive like in Malcolm Gladwell's books. > > ** 2. If you are under 35 and work in technology, no matter how technical your role. This is because so much of the technology you use now is virtual...software defined networking, virtual machines, virtual routers, VLANs, VPCs, AWS, etc. The internet is still a very very physical place, made up of hundreds of thousands of miles or wire, giant internet exchange centers (like the kind Facebook runs out of Nebraska that you'll never see), $80,000 routers made by Brocade that people like Verizon buy, etc. If you want to know how the internet works in the same way that you can open your car and know how everything works (as opposed to just buying a Tesla), get this book.

I found Tubes, by Andrew Blum to be fascinating. https://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Internet-Andrew-Blum/dp/0061994952

Andrew Blum's Tubes tries to cover much of the same ground for the physical layer of the Internet. I found it an interesting read.

Great post, if folks want more (easy to digest) info check out the book "Tubes" by Andrew Blum.

Read Andrew Blum's bestselling book Tubes about these undersea cables and the other infrastructure of the Internet.

There's a great book called "Tubes" that's about just that:

https://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Internet-Andrew-Blum/dp/0061994952

http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-A-Journey-Center-Internet/dp/0061994952

http://www.loudountimes.com/index.php/news/article/pressure_on_for_western_connectivity432

> In a county with the highest median household income in the country - where more than 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic flows - a large area of western Loudoun is without any real broadband Internet connectivity.

I used to live in western Loudoun. I moved to get FiOS :)