Oh my God! Glatt, that was one of my favorite books as a child, and I had completely forgotten about it until you linked it just now. I think I may have to buy it from Amazon right now.
Edit: Ha! I just noticed one of the product reviews at the bottom of the page:
Quote:
Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities... The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).
...
If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can't recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.
...
The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens' Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante's seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno.
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