IS-IS: Deployment in IP Networks

Rating:
Summary: Better off choosing an alternative selection
Review: As IS-IS is one of the more esoteric protocols, understood only by a few people in large scale ISP environments, I thought this book would be a welcome addition to my library as there isn't much else on the market covering this protocol. There are of course ISO 10589 and RFC 1195 which covers these protocols, but seeing as this is a short book I thought it might be able to shed some light on an otherwise complex protocol.

In reviewing this book I've come up disappointed in general. There are certainly a few golden nuggets and I give the book a couple of stars just for attempting to bridge the gap between the purely theoretical and the purely vendor specific. However, the book comes up short on most other points. Often times I found myself wanting to scrap this book in favor of some of the other selections on the market, but since I have respect for these authors I read the whole book hoping that they might be able to redeem themselves by the time I finished.

Obviously the authors have a great deal of knowledge about the subject, and I don't fault them entirely. The quality of the editing is poor with many grammatical and syntactical errors littered throughout the text. There are abundant instances throughout the book where the diagrams used do not match the text describing them. I was rather disappointed because I usually find that Addison-Wesley publishes some of the best texts on the market.

All in all, I thought this book could have been a lot better than it was. After all, these authors have several other titles under their belt, most notably "Advanced IP Network Design". But in this case, I would say that you are better off looking for other similar titles available on the market, such as Jeff Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP Volume 1".