The popularity of wireless networking has grown exponentially over the past few years, despite a general downward trend in the telecommunications industry. More and more computers and users worldwide communicate via radio waves every day, cutting the tethers of the cabled network both at home and at work.

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and other characters by assigning a number for each one. There are hundreds of different encoding systems for mapping characters to numbers, but Unicode promises a single mapping. Unicode enables a single software product or website to be targeted across multiple platforms, languages and countries without re-engineering. It's no wonder that industry giants like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM andMicrosoft have all adopted Unicode.

This book will teach the reader how to make the most of their WRT54G series hardware. These handy little inexpensive devices can be configured for a near endless amount of networking tasks. The reader will learn about the WRT54G's hardware components, the different third-party firmware available and the differences between them, choosing the firmware that is right for you, and how to install different third-party firmware distributions.