Chapter 1 at a Glance
The purpose of these chapter overviews, which you find on the back of each chapter’s opening page, is to indicate the order in which material is presented and thus make it easier to find a particular section from its context. See it as a local subset of the table of contents, only with some contextual reference.
The highlighted words are the main headings in the chapter, which introduce second-level headings in the list items. Ideally, you would have the same hyperlink capability to jump directly to each section as I have on my screen, but Alas, earwax.…
This overview chapter is designed to give a background in broad strokes on computer-mediated peer-to-peer systems. The goal is to find a workable and meaningful definition of the p2p concept, without which much of the later discussion could easily be misunderstood.
The Concept takes a hard look at the fundamentals of peer-to-peer as a meaningful term and attempts to strip away the hype.
Next we consider The Killer P2P Application and how any such application must critically depend on how p2p can address both The Bandwidth Factor and The Distribution Factor. This leads to A Common Denominator, which summarizes the essential characteristics that define p2p as considered in this book.
Using Historical Analogies, this section attempts to nail down a useful technical definition along with criteria for evaluating different approaches.
Telephony provides an illuminating analogy, not least because it laid the infrastructure on which networking was built. Internet Infrastructure next looks at how the Internet moved from its p2p roots to a more hierarchical structure.
Power to the People examines what p2p means for the individual, as an alternative to the now more common client-server architecture.
Virtual P2P revisits the killer application theme and discusses how Original Chat and IM have been early contenders for that title.