Optical communication has become a classic networking technology. If this year’s Nobel Prize is not proof enough, the third edition of the book by Ramaswami et al. confirms it. The book includes thorough coverage of basic optical technology and networking topics, presented in a format that is easy to understand even for a layman or undergraduate student; specialists will also find it useful, due to its modularity. Previous editions of the work were broadly commented and reviewed; here, I focus mainly on the new and rewritten material.

Ramaswami and Sivarajan invited Sasaki, another distinguished optical networking expert, to collaborate on the book; they extend this edition with more than 100 pages, making it approximately 900 pages long. The work is still divided into two groups of topics--technology and networking--plus the comprehensive appendices that help with understanding the prerequisites of the main chapters. The contents were analyzed and modified to map technology changes that occurred since the previous edition was published in 2002. Most of the changes are in the networking part. In the technology part, waveguide description of a fiber is added, intermodal dispersion is extensively described, and fibers other than glass-based ones are mentioned. As before, there is broad coverage of different physical aspects of light propagation, basic components and modulation/demodulation methods, and fundamentals of the physical-layer design.

The networking part starts with a description of technologies for which optical networking is used. New material in this edition includes an overview of next-generation SONET technologies--virtual concatenation and the link capacity adjustment scheme. The optical transport network, the generic framing procedure, and Ethernet solutions replace the dying asynchronous transfer mode, which is relegated to an appendix. Additionally, there is a new resilient packet ring (RPR)-related section, and the section on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is longer. There is an overview of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) building elements--expansions on reconfigurable optical add-drop mutliplexers--and the material on control/management of networks is refreshed. The network survivability chapter is enhanced with an introduction to RPR, Ethernet, and (generalized) MPLS recovery. Next, the authors deal with a WDM network design, and provide a short sketch of optical access techniques. The next chapter is about a future technique for photonic packet switching. The main part of the book ends with deployment considerations.

This is an excellent reference book for students and teachers, mainly due to sections that supplement each chapter with interesting problems and comprehensive further reading materials. It will also be useful to practitioners and advanced researchers in optical network engineering, who would like to learn the most important aspects of this communication field.