Serial Programming - upload.wikimedia....

Introduction and OSI Model
the OSI model could be demonstrated in a manner that students would learn from firsthand
experiences why certain rules/systems have been implemented on the Internet, what
standards documents mean, and perhaps even participate in creating standards documents.
If you are a professor or High School instructor interested in using this text, I would be
particularly interested in adapting this text to better suit your needs, or working with you
in covering this subject.
From a professionalperspective, this is a topic that is seldom taught at a university, and
usually only in passing when they are rushing through a whole bunch of other protocol suites.
Software developers are usually introduced to this topic by having their supervisor dump
a bunch of specification documents on their desk, a driver disk with API documentation,
and perhaps a typically short deadline in order to get something working that should have
been working sometime last year. Software developers who really understand serial data
communication are worth gold, and often even these developers only learn just enough to
get the immediate job done.
I've also found that skills learned from developing serial data communications also translate
into other projects and give a deeper understanding of just about any data transmission
system. In addition to the other groups I mentioned, I am also aiming for those unfortunate
software engineers who are trying to learn just about anything about this very difficult
subject and don't know where to begin. Documentation about serial communication is
sparse, and sometime contradictory.
This doesn't have to be that complicated of a subject, and it is possible for mere mortals to
be able to understand how everything works.
1.6 External Links / References
• Cisco explanation of the OSI model 1
• University of Indiana / Unix Support Group explanation of OSI 2
• ISO catalog of OSI standards 3
1.7 Other Serial Programming Articles
Category:Serial Programming 4
1 http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/ito_doc/introint.htm
2 http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/usail/network/nfs/network_layers.html
3 http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueListPage.CatalogueList?ICS1=35&ICS2=100
4 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category%3ASerial%20Programming
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