tcp-ip

I was looking for a book to explain networking to a friend who's just starting out in the field. I've been doing this for 6+ years and I found this book to be more confusing than helpful. I have *never* heard the nomenclature used in this book anywhere to describe networks. I can't think of a great disservice to new networking admins than to fill their heads with words they wont use and problems the wont need to solve.

I would wager that > 95% of networks installed today don't use IGRP and RIP because of CIDR and VLSM constraints (among other reasons), yet these are the only two protocols described in the book. By using such antiquated protocols, problems easily solved are compounded into difficult and obtuse examples of what may occur if one goes out of their way to make life more difficult.

The digression into a 3 year old Cisco bug, just to prove a point, I found to be a further waste of the readers time and another classic example of this books inability to leave the reader with a useful set of examples that may one day appear on their job.

This book would have been much more useful if it went over EIGRP and OSPF - protocols that networks actually use today. Then time could have been spent on more useful digressions into route propagation and updates.

This edition to the Cisco Press has proved a long held belief. They print as much garbage as they do gems. After reading this book, the only thought I had left was, "I want 5 hours of my life back".

Robert Wright provides in his book a clear introduction in IP routing. He describes RIP, RIP-2 and IGRP and provides a lot of practical examples to demonstrate the various routing and addressing concepts.

He also provides an overview about routing metrics & distances, IP addressing, VLSM, default routing and gives some detailed explanation about summarization and the problems with discontigous networks.

As I'm working as a technical instructor I used a lot of his examples to eplain my students some of the inside concepts of IP routing.

I strongly recommend this book to everybody who intends to dive into the world of IP internetworking. This book is not only for beginners it also provides some valuable information for intermediate users or even experts.

Very well done, thank you, Robert:-)

Excellent material, covering vital IP fundamentals, for people who intend understanding and supporting IP networks. Notwithstanding the fact that technical books are by far the most difficult to write, for their appeal to their intended audience, and the intended knowledge transfer, this book achieves these feats rather well. This book would have benefitted greatly from a knowledgeable proof reader. It is possible that people completely new to this material, may suffer somewhat.