Jade Clayton Views
Jade Clayton's McGraw-Hill Illustrated Telecom Dictionary, now in its fourth edition, is a wonderful work I consult first when looking up a term. Deliberately focused on telephony terms, the book contains 3,000 definitions, along with 400 photos, diagrams, or charts. Clayton has a strong background with telephone companies and explains topics well.
The only comparable dictionary in this price range is Harry Newton's Telecom Dictionary, which tries to cover the entire field of communications. Keeping in mind Clayton's emphasis on traditional but up-to-date telecom definitions, Jade's book has many things Newton's work does not have: original writing throughout, photographs and diagrams, and a searchable CD ROM that features the book's entire text, as well as content from other McGraw Hill publications.
q"I mentioned before that many definitions were written for different audiences, some technical and some non-technical, depending on the training material I was developing. Since 1998 I've tried writing definitions from an Open Systems Interconnection model so that readers can fit what they learn into the big picture. The definitions you mentioned were defined from different OSI perspectives, and from different industry point of views. I had a huge challenge in the first edition, for example, reconciling LAN environment definitions. I have since gone through the book to make those definitions better agree with each other. I continue to make adjustments to existing definitions and to try to keep up with the pace of new stuff amidst the flurry of new products and technologies introduced to the industry weekly.k" Jade Clayton
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