I created The TCP/IP Guide to provide you with an unparalleled breadth and depth of information on TCP/IP. This meant including a lot of content in this Guide—it has over 600 sections, subsections and individual topics, and is over 1,600 pages long. However, I recognized as I was writing this tome that the real goal is not just to provide a lot of detailed information, but also to present it in such a way that it can be easily understood by you, the reader. This requires more than just writing large amounts of text and putting it all into a large file.

For this reason, I have incorporated a number of special features into this Guide to help make it easier for you to “digest”. J These include tools that will help you navigate through the information, others that let you quickly jump to related topics, and graphical elements that explain difficult topics or simply highlight important text elements. Most of these features are also designed to exploit the many advantages of electronic documents, such as hyperlinking and the ability to embed full-color graphics.

Here is a description of some of these special features, in no particular order:

• Hierarchical Table of Contents: The TCP/IP Guide uses a hierarchical structure, which I described in detail in the previous topic discussing the Guide’s organization. A complete Table of Contents has of course been included, which reflects this hierarchical structure. It is fully hyperlinked, so you can quickly jump to any topic of interest just by clicking your mouse on the topic’s title.
  
  For your convenience, there is also a link to the Table of Contents at the top of each page.
  
  
• Figures: The TCP/IP Guide contains over 300 full-color illustrations, which support the text descriptions of TCP/IP technologies and protocols, and help make sense of difficult concepts. Each figure is cross-referenced with a hyperlink from an appropriate place in the text. Most include brief descriptions that allow you to understand what the figure means without even having to read the full text of the topic where the figure is located.
  
  
• Tables: The Guide has over 300 tables, which present large amounts of information in an organized and readable manner, or highlight examples for your convenience. These tables use alternating white and colored rows for enhanced readability. Like the figures, these tables are cross-referenced from the text using hyperlinks.
  
  
• Hyperlinks: In addition to the hyperlinks in the Table of Contents and the cross-references to figures and tables, there are over 3,000 additional hyperlinks within the actual text of the Guide. These links are shown as normal HTML hyperlinks; when you see one, clicking it will take you to the topic discussing whatever subject matter was highlighted by the link. This lets you quickly find information relevant to understanding the topic you are currently exploring.
  
  Note that all hyperlinks that appear in the main part of this Guide are internal links that go to other places within the Guide; external links are shown separately (see below).
  
  
• Highlighting: I use a consistent highlighting mechanism to make the text easier to read. When new terms are introduced they are shown in italics; I also italicize the names of fields, messages, options and other protocol constructs to set them apart from regular text. Emphasized words are shown in bold italics. Document titles are italicized and underlined. There are also a few places where colored text is used for emphasis.