Network Consultant's Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Sloppy editing
Review: I am reading this book via the O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf, and am glad I didn't buy it based on the (only) glowing review here. This book is a so-so reference to networking technologies, but suffers from bad grammar and technical mistakes. It is very disjointed and many paragraphs, and even sentences, do not flow together very well. Here is an example:

Yet another drawback of IPSec is that it is not compliant with IPv4, so it requires the use of IPv6. This incompatibility is causing much discussion among IETF officials, resulting in the delay with the release of the protocol.

The first sentence is just wrong. The second phrase of the second sentence is just hard to read. One has to wonder how much time the 'reviewers' spent actually reading the manuscript.

Rating:
Summary: Cisco books give me a headache
Review: I sat down in the bookstore today with Network Consultant's Handbook and found it to be as hard to read as most other Cisco Press books. This book is hard to read because like most other Cisco books, it is a patchwork of concepts thrown together and published without proofreading for typos, ambiguities, awkwardness, and correctness. It is an incompetent, incomplete work that does nothing more than awkwardly state a few jumbled facts. It does little for trying to understand the concepts and it is useless for troubleshooting real life problems. Cisco Press books, in general, are much worse than even Microsoft Press books. So, that leaves me, the student, avoiding Cisco books and in search of more interesting and competent reading.

Rating:
Summary: Cisco books give me a headache
Review: I sat down in the bookstore today with Network Consultant's Handbook and found it to be as hard to read as most other Cisco Press books. This book is hard to read because like most other Cisco books, it is a patchwork of concepts thrown together and published without proofreading for typos, ambiguities, awkwardness, and correctness. It is an incompetent, incomplete work that does nothing more than awkwardly state a few jumbled facts. It does little for trying to understand the concepts and it is useless for troubleshooting real life problems. Cisco Press books, in general, are much worse than even Microsoft Press books. So, that leaves me, the student, avoiding Cisco books and in search of more interesting and competent reading.

Rating:
Summary: Giving you a look into the world of Cisco Networking.
Review: In the IT industry consultants of any networking value are constantly updating the skill sets with the latest information available, so it is true with Cisco Consultants and technicians. This book is one of the first sources I have ever found to bring to you information about Cisco products and networking.

Beginning the 960 plus page manual is the OSI Model, layer by layer, then LAN Topologies, with topics like unicast, broadcast and multicast as well as bus, ring and star topologies. Finally this section gives you information about the hard devices you'll be working with.

802.3, Ethernet, documentation and analysis take chapters 3,4 & 5 followed up with Token Ring and 802.5. FDDI, ATM LANE, telecommunications such as ISDN, DSLx, and T1 and DS technologies are next on the list of topics discussed.

The author covers Fiber Optics real well in Chapter 14 and then moves on to 120 pages of Frame Relay. The next 65 pages are for ATM, ATM WAN, MPOA, cell and cell relay coverage. Other topics covered are VoIP, VPN, SMNP and network management and that gets you to chapter 24.

From there the author takes 110 pages to cover the routing protocols associated with Cisco routers, protocols like RIP, RIPv2, IGRP, EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS and BGP. The book is rounded out by IPv6 and Multiprotocol Label switching. I do think more coverage of switches and switching could have been included as well.

Several appendices were also included for things like Network Assessments, subnet masks and protocol lists. The book has several case studies included to help you understand the concepts presented as well as screen shots of the actual router code. Overall this is one great book to have and a great addition to my technical library.