I've always enjoyed blogging about anything and everything; things I love and things I want to share with others. I first started getting really into blogging while I was in my first year of university. I would write posts about computer security and my general ideas and thoughts on things surrounding the topic. Whenever I was particularly passionate about a topic that I was either studying or researching, I would blog about it. That's really how this book came about; from being at the university and then blogging about it. The reason why I was using OMNeT++ in the first place was because of the degree I was reading in Computer Science and the need to simulate networks for research. In my final year of graduation, I proposed to do my own dissertation instead of choosing from the set list that my batch had been given. It was a dissertation that was completely drenched in my passion for networks and security and was titled Optimizing Self-Aware Networks to Defend Against Distributed Denial of Service Attack. There was no way I could get around the epically long title! The reason why I wanted to defend against DDoS attacks was because of how popular they were. This popularity not only led me to realize how simple such an attack is, but also how difficult they are to defend against. In my research, I realized that I needed to study two main crippling barriers in creating a DDoS attack: cost and time. The main problem was that I needed to create massive wide area networks in order to observe the mechanisms of a life-sized DDoS attack. DDoS attacks were very popular in 2011 and are very popular even today. I found that the only good answer to this problem was simulation. I set out to try and create a lifelike model of a DDoS attack using simulation and not just something "like" a DDoS attack. I wanted something that truly was a DDoS attack, but just on a "non-physical" network, mostly because I couldn't afford the real thing and I wouldn't have had the time to set it up in real life.

After spending the next five minutes on Google, I came across OMNeT++. It boasted of everything that I was looking for and needed. OMNeT++ made network simulation fun for me. It made it easy to edit my simulations and learn from the networks I had created. I'm a very visual learner, so the visual side of OMNeT++ made the simulations completely real for me. I loved what I had found from my five-minute Google search. I was really impressed. So, as with everything similar I come across, I blogged about it. Shortly thereafter, I received an e-mail from Reshma Raman, an Author Acquisition Executive from Packt Publishing. The conversation went something like this: "Would you like to be an author for a mini book on OMNeT++?" "Sure," I replied. It felt like an invitation to extend my love of blogging on a grander scale, and I also knew that I'd learn a lot more about OMNeT++ in the process. You can never say you know everything, so I never do.