With Hulbert, Paul Hulbert. Visibly shaken, but not yet stirred.
I did a lot of this stuff at A-Level, so yeah, stuff.

Topology is the shape! Like a star, or a line, with switches and routers and terminals and stuff.
Ring topology: Nodes in a serially closed loop. Messages are sent (in one direction) around the ring until it reaches the destination node.
Bus: Nodes connected into a single backbone cable. Any node can go straight to any other node, but only one message can go through the bus at once.
Star: Nodes connected to a central hub (e.g. a server). All computers are connected to the hub, hubs can be connected together, if a hub fails then all connections are lost.

Shannon-Weaver model of communication:
INFORMATION SOURCE ->(message)-> TRANSMITTER ->(signal)-> NOISE SOURCE ->(received signal)-> RECEIVER ->(message)-> DESTINATION

LAN: Local Area Network (local network)
WAN: Wide Area Network (heterogeneous infrastructure network - a mishmash of different kinds of networks and topologies)
BAN/PAN: Body Area Network/Personal Area Network (networks over one's person - e.g. phone and Bluetooth headset, RFID)
MAN: Metropolitan Area Network (city-wide or university-wide networks)
VAN: Value Added Network (provided by a network provider which adds email, EDI, etc in addition to basic network services; tends to be used by multiple organisations at once)
AN: Academic Network (university networks, such as JANET)

Backbone local networks support a number of LANs within an enterprise and/or geographically large area.

Back end networks interconnect large systems such as mainframes, super computers and mass storage devices. They're the kind of things that connect backbone local networks (which connect a number of LANs). They need high speed interfaces, but can support massive amounts of data transfer.