Three quickies
Every so often I get books in the mail from publishers for review. I love doing it, not only for the free books, but also because people are always asking me which books are worth buying.
Normally I try to do a detailed review of the good ones, but sometimes I get backed up. Here are three books that I've been through recently.
Cisco IOS in a Nutshell, 2ed
Cisco IOS in a Nutshell is a great reference for those that don't spend a lot of time in the IOS CLI. It has information on absolutely everything (in varying degrees of detail). Going over the features that I frequently use (LAN switching, EIGRP, troubleshooting) showed that the level of detail would be appropriate for most people.
I was pleased with the examples and the layout of the book. It's very how-to oriented, with a solid coverage of the basics, and a look at the really complex stuff. It's current as of the 12.3T train, so the shelf live of this book is excellent.
The IOS guru would probably be best to look elsewhere, since they'll know a lot of the content, and a search on cisco.com will pull up the detail you're looking for. However if you use IOS infrequently, this 800 page volume will be a time saver.
TCP/IP Guide - A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
View this on O'Reilly.I'm not even sure where to begin with this book. It's huge (1650 pages). It covers everything from networking to TCP/IP to routing protocols and the major layer 7 protocols in detail. Packet formats, common uses, everything.
While it's tempting to drone on about the topics covered, I think it's more helpful to look at a few of the outstanding features instead. The diagrams explaining the protocols are excellent. The author's diagrams really make sense of the protocols. Case in point -- the TCP FSM. Have you ever tried to follow the one out of the RFC? It's brutal. The one here adds some text and shading, making it clear as day. Trying to remember how IP fragmentation works? There's an example all worked out for you here.
For the topics themselves:
Basic networking stuff and routing protocols
Layer 3: IPv4, IPv6, PPP, ARP, NAT, IPSEC, Mobile IP, ICMP
Layer 4: TCP, UDP,
Layer 5-7: DNS, NFS, BOOTP/DHCP, SNMP, FTP/TFTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP, NNTP, Gopher (heh)
There's also a great deal of background information. When talking about email, there's a look at MIME and the encoding. For HTTP, there's a discussion of URIs.
This is an outstanding reference book for anyone involved in networking, or managing applications such as email and web. It has an incredible level of detail and will make RFC reading almost unnecessary. As a network guy who often finds himself trying to find documentation on a protocol's behaviour, this book will come in handy.
Optimal Routing Design
View this at Cisco Press
This book is a rewrite of the 1999 title Advanced IP Network Design, which was a CCIE professional development book. The focus is on desiging large scale networks by efficient use of the routing protocols, and advanced features of the protocols.
Optimial Routing Design picks up where the Doyle books (Routing TCP/IP Vols 1&2) leave off. It assumes you have a detailed understanding of EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP (though the appendices and sitebars provide a lot of this if you don't), and then really gets into the details of how to use them in a large network.
After looking at how to scale the core routing protocols, the book goes on to look at how to improve convergeance time, both by tweaking the routing protocols themselves and the layer 2 technologies. Security, VPNs, MPLS, and other tunneling techniques are also investigated toward the end.
While the topic is about scaling huge networks, the examples distill the techniques into a few routers, so that you can try them yourself. Just in the EIGRP chapter alone I found a few examples that after trying, I was able to put to use in my own network.
I found a few problems with the diagrams in the first few chapters, where the diagram and explanatory text didn't line up. Other than that, it's a good read. There's liberal use of humour in what could otherwise be a dry subject.
This is a really advanced book, but a fascinating read if you like to understand the hows and whys of routing protocols. If you just put down Routing TCP/IP and are asing yourself "now what?", this is the book you want.
Posted by Sean at December 17, 2005 10:04 AM | TrackBackReferences
[1]http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cisconut2/index.html[2]http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/159327047X/
[3]http://www.ciscopress.com/title/1587051877
Tags: book networking ios tcp/ip cisco