Channels and Networks Books

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an overlooked means of communication in this era of instant messaging, texting on cell phones, networking sites and the like. Yet IRC remains a great source for on-the-spot and authoritative technical knowledge and help; leisure time socializing and just observing how many nutty people there are online. (Some of the poltical, religious and other IRC channels are absolutely hilarious to observe.)

Relatively few of the tips and hacks in this book will be of use to the ordinary IRC user. Most presume a modest proficiency in programming Java or Perl and a more than modest understanding of how IRC works. Still, even though the book will not be of great use to most IRC users, it is still worth a read if for no other reason than to expand your own knowledge of IRC and what can be done with it.

Jerry

IRC Hacks
100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
By Paul Mutton
First Edition July 2004
Series: Hacks
ISBN: 0-596-00687-X
432 pages, $24.95

I found this book to be fairly interesting and somewhat useful. Being quite familiar with IRC already, some of the introductory material was information that I already knew, but I did learn a few things about the more technical aspects of the IRC protocol and IRC servers/networks. Much of this book has to do with writing and using IRC channel "bots", which I think most casual IRC users would not be all that interested in.

The first four chapters introduce what IRC is, and how to connect to an IRC network and begin chatting with others. Various IRC client applications are described, including the most popular ones for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Other topics here include how to register your nickname, configuring your client, how to join servers/channels, and some nice customizations to add functionality and enjoyment to your use of IRC. I would think that these first chapters would be very useful to a newcomer to IRC, and allow them to get up and running quickly.

Chapter 5 introduces the concepts of "bots", and how to write your own bots in various languages, including Perl, Python, and Java. Some of it is fairly technical, and may appeal mostly to programmers and more serious IRC "hackers". Also mentioned is the idea of bot "ethics" and the policies that many IRC networks have regarding their use.

The next several chapters (6 - 12) provide numerous ideas and examples of making and using your own bots. IRC bots can perform many functions, some of which can be very useful, and others that have primarily an entertainment value. Much of the content of these chapters is actual code examples for many different types of bots, including Logging, Social, Search & Query, Announcement, Network and Channel Management, and Fun bots.

Chapters 13 - 15 go a little further into the technical side of how the IRC protocol works, encryption, web access to IRC, and even how to run your own IRC server. Many readers will find these subjects more complex than they care to get involved in.

Overall, I think this book is best suited to IRC users who are somewhat more than beginners, and are fairly technically oriented. I was surprised by the large amount of bot programming examples, which actually make up the majority of the book. I am not sure there will be that many users who really want to code their own bot. The first few chapters are helpful for IRC beginners, although there are probably better books for that purpose. I did get some ideas for modifying an existing bot, which I presently use occasionally in our LUG's IRC channel for entertainment (trivia contests). All in all, this title is best suited for more experienced users who may enjoy programming and "hacking" around with IRC bots.

I was first introduced to IRC back in 1997, with a co-worker who spent a lot of his time typing away at a text-based IRC client. He told me later he had some very good friends on IRC, one of which my co-worker never met in person until this friend came to my co-worker's wedding. I ventured into some IRC channels myself, but always felt a little "behind the curve" in terms of understanding what was going on beyond the basics of just participating in a discussion.

Many who are new to IRC may feel the same way, and often those accustomed to the medium are less than accomodating of newbies. Fortunately O'Reilly's IRC Hacks comes to the rescue. O'Reilly uses the term "hacks" here in the positive sense of a clever way to use a particular technology, or an elegant way to solve a certain problem.

The first couple of chapters constitute an introduction to IRC. Various IRC clients for Windows, Linux, and Max OS X are covered, along with ways to enhance these clients. That might be enough for many users of IRC, but to be true to its title, the book proceeds to describe several frameworks you can use to write your own IRC bots in Java, Perl, and Python. No less than 7 chapters follow outlining a wide variety of different bots that can be used to enhance your IRC experience.

The remaining chapters give an in-depth look at the IRC protocol, describe ways in which you can connect to IRC via "other" means (such as from a mobile phone), and also provide coverage on setting up your own IRC server.

Overall IRC Hacks is very informational, and a good introduction to IRC. Perhaps one of its greatest strengths is the large number of "starting points" it provides to allow you to do just about anything with IRC. One complaint I have about the book is that in the chapters offering samples of bots you can write, the vast majority of them are written in Java. I would like to have seen more Perl in the mix. It's there to some extent in the beginning chapters, but Java examples dominate the latter part of the book.

I have just read an article on slashdot on how the author has "analysed" IRC networks and concluded 99.9% of the traffic from the top 60 channels is illegal. What I wonder is, the top 60 channels all belong to warez groups and have nothing to do with the countless legit constructive channels around. Its like generalizing the internet to one particular field like pornography or illegal file-sharing.

Overall, I think this author is unqualified to write without bias and wouldn't recommend his work to others. Sincerity begets appreciation and this author deserves none.

This book opens up a whole new dimension of functionality for instant messaging. There are about fifty recipes dedicated specifically to helping you get automated access to information through IRC. Most of the examples are in Java, but there is some Perl and Python as well.

As Hacks books go this is a little looser than the others. I would have liked less time spent on the user interface twiddling, and I'm not sure what the artificial intelligence hack was about. But overall the book is great.

For anyone who loves instant messaging and wants to allow access to their applications through IM, this is the book. If you are a hardcore IRC user you will also want to have a look at this book.

So far the content is good, but the editing is so bad that it leaves the book almost unreadable. I understand there may a language issue, but give me a break, I am paying $40.00 for a hard cover, professional book, written in english and published by a well known and respected publisher. I believe I should be able to reasonably expect that the grammar is correct and blatant typos are removed - this book looks more like a draft than a final copy. Some sentences are so bad they make no sense, which makes reading the book challenging since you have to skim over the nonsense to extract the useful information.

I gave it a 3 for the content, I would give it a 1 for readability and quality. I will be asking Addison Wesley for my money back on this one.

This book is written in very human-friendly language , you can read this book very easily like a magazine. The author divided this books into three parts , and those are NAS security, SAN security and iSCSI security. As the author said in the beginning of this book, this book for only introduction to storage security, and the author does only that.

When it comes to negative points, the major problem with this book is , the author telling the story again and again . If he explained one point , he will repeat the same thing again and again later. So , out of 400 pages the book has , at the end of the day, you are getting only 100 page worth of knowledge.

On more major issue with this book is , the author didn't given sufficient information about the actual storage security protocols like FCSP and others.

Don't expect too much from this book , this book is a very simple and introduction level book to storage security.

Dwivedi does an excellent job of covering a little thought about area of networking that is growing rapidly.

The layout of the book is well thought out and takes the reader thru a step-by-step process of how networked storage is hacked. This is not a book that you would want to read once and expect to have all the answers. Dwivedi has written this book with both the reader and that concept in mind. It contains a vast amount of knowledge about network storage secutity. There is so much information that memorizing this book would be impossible
Dwivedi provides the reader with numerous assessment exercises making it easier to understand the large amount of information and techniques presented. It is thoroughly indexed and arranged in away that allows anyone to access an attack method and reference that process including the downloads with which to attack any choosen vulnerability.

The introduction section of this book gives anyone with little or no network storage knowledge a very concise understanding of risk management, security basics and attack scenarios. It is finalized with a handy question and answer section that helps tie it all together.

Dwivedi covers processes, types of storage and the designs most commonly used in storage networks in great detail. He covers SAN, NAS and iSCSI Security and the ways in which to attack each successfully. Every conceivable attack on network storage and how they are done, including many links to scripts are included for the reader. They show the reader general storage network knowledge and how to audit their own systems for security weaknesses. It gives the reader a very broad overview of the subject with detailed specifics, which helps to understand the technical basis of attacks and how to deter those attacks.


Dwivedi wraps it all together with details on how to lock down each of the network storage types in detail. As with the rest of the book he lists precise step-by-step ways to
audit a system and keep out the unauthorized. In the last part of the book Dwivedi also covers compliance, regulations and how they relate to storage. He shows how Sarbanes,HIPAA,G-LB, and CA SB1386 affect storage and storage security. He covers the main sections of each regulation and gives highlights about each, including common examples of what is affected. To help the reader further digest an otherwise difficult to comprehend subject, Dwivedi provides three case studies of how actual companies have secured their networked storage.

If you do any networked storage or securty I highly recommend this great security book as an addition to your referance library.

The theme of this book is that Storage Area Networks and Network Attached Storage have been hitherto neglected with respect to securing their contents against unauthorised use. Dwivedi remarks that most sysadmins focus on maintaining and securing a corporate firewall. Along with regularly patching users' machines plus web servers. A common attitude is that SAN and NAS devices are at the very heart of the corporate network, and often cannot be directly accessed from outside the firewall.

Dwivedi spends the bulk of his book debunking this idea. For one thing, he points out that a SAN or NAS box is a computer that has to run an operating system. Usually linux, unix or Microsoft. A vendor is very unlikely to write a custom operating system from scratch. Too expensive and takes too long to devise. So even if nothing else, you as a sysadmin should regularly patch those boxes if you can, when known bugs are found in their operating systems. These boxes should be no more exempt from patching than your other machines, even those behind the firewall.

Another cause of concern is the sheer mass of data on a SAN or NAS box. Nowadays, likely to be many gigabytes. These are high value targets for an attacker. Whereas a typical user's desktop would have much smaller data sets.

Plus, even with a firewall, there is always the possibility of an employee being an attacker. If she has a machine inside the firewall, then this already gives her a good start. Of course, you might reply that you "lock down" your users' machines, so that they cannot get root access, for example. But the attacker with a Microsoft machine could boot off a Knoppix CD, for example, and go into a linux that sits only in memory, and for which she has root. Suppose now you have a NAS box exporting a file system via NFS to the attacker's machine, which is normally running Microsoft Windows. The author shows how the attacker can from her Knoppix OS mount the NAS file system and by changing her local passwd file, assume any user id and group id that gives her read access (and maybe write access) to any file in the foreign file system.

These are the sort of attacks that you have to guard against. The book offers several chapters at its end describing possible countermeasures. The tone of the book is not alarmist. Rather, Dwivedi matter of factly walks through many attacks; the above being just one case. He shows how using open source code freely available on the net, that an attacker could gleam useful data from your machines.

Storage Security provides a very good overview and a good insight in the world of storage security and its possible pitfalls.

The book starts off with a global introduction on security concepts, a description of what is going to be covered in the remainder of the book, as well as a Q&A of real-life questions, which might contain too many new concepts to fully appreciate. After that, each chapter describes a set of architecture-specific attacks (i.e. attacks which focus only on FC, CIFS, NFS, iSCSI), and tries to position the attacks in a Security Business Risk (SBR) matrix. The description of the attacks is done in a fairly modular setup, which enforces the idea of the book being a reference as well as a book that can be read cover to cover.

The remainder of the book focuses not on the attacks but on the ways SANs and DAS can be protected, actual command line parameters for NetApp and Cisco boxes (which might serve as a handy reference for the NetApp and Cisco people among us), as well as several case studies.

The writer takes his time to explain intricate details of lesser known attacks and solutions, and covers all sorts of techniques that many system administrators might not be up to date with, such as zone hopping and E-port replication.


No book is perfect, and neither is this one. Among the things that bothered me the most while reading the book are:

- The number of typos in this book is incredible, making me wonder whether this book was proofread in the first place. For example, the paragraph on page 101/102 contains four typos alone:

* "to a greater degree that the" instead of "to a greater degree than the".
* "While this may seen to be" instead of "While this may seem to be".
* "sensitive application such as" instead of "sensitive applications such as".
* "should requite a higher degree" instead of "should require a higher degree of".

These are all fairly innocuous; the same cannot be said from writing down things like "Diffie-Hielman CHAP" (page 32).

- Please make sure that images meant to clarify difficult concepts (such as man-in-the-middle attacks using spoofed PLOGI frames and name server pollution), as well as the accompanying explanation, do not contain typos that complicate things even further. See page 67.

- Many people learn by repetition. However, explaning me how to change a node WWN 4 times with the same screenshots in a range of 50 pages might be a little too much repetition. The same goes for the explanation of the result (a possible denial-of-service attack), which is copied and pasted multiple times (see e.g. 79, 115, 119, 124).

- By the time I write this review, the web page mentioned on the back cover as well as on page 375 (http://www.isecpartners.com/securingstorage) is not online, which is a shame. It only takes 5 minutes to come up with a proper "This page is under construction, but for now take a look at the following interesting sites or articles" page.

- Stick to acronyms. If the acronym for port WWN is WWPN, don't change that into pWWN in the next chapter. It's not consistent, and might be confusing for people that are new to this (fascinating) area.

Overall, the book earns 4 stars. It fills a gap that needs to be filled, and does so with technical accuracy, good examples, clear writing style and screenshots that add to the understanding of the reader. The font and layout is well-chosen, so it shouldn't be a problem to read this book for hours on end if you would like so.

This is a good book. It provides a solid foundation for questioning the way in which MANs are constructed today. The problem with the book is the author takes a confusing stance on the subject of constructing pure Ethernet networks within the MAN. At points, you will feel as though the author isn't sure himself that this is the best solution for providing a robust solution. But still a very good read. When I first picked it up, I couldn't put it down. But I kept expecting something that never did manifest. This book needed to provide more detail in terms of the actual construction,and less on the comparison between legacy TDM and Ethernet. Very much worth reading though.

Some of the information in this book is a little out of date, it would be nice if there was a new revision. Other than that, I've found this book to be very helpful. I haven't found any of the language problems that some of the other reviewers mentioned, although I haven't read it cover-to-cover. I'm very pleased with this book and would purchase it again.

Overall, this is the best storage book that you ever read .

Honestly. Please spend your money wisely. For just under 100 bucks you get a book with about 300 pages which includes a diagram on just about every page. The referenced diagrams are very poorly explained. If you enjoy reading functional requirement documents, this book is definitely for you. I've read the reviews giving praise to this book, yet nothing to be said about what they had learned. Tip! Checkout SAN for dummies.

This is one of the best books I've encountered in many years. What I like about it:
- Describes everything (using illustration) from file-systems and volume managers down to transport concepts like fibre channel, iSCSI, infiniband, VI
- Goes into concepts like mirroring, snapshots and other technologies in an easy to relate manner.

Despite the relatively high price, I give this book an A and would heartily recommend it. However this book is not for programmers or those intending to design things. Neither is it for sales/marketing folks who just want to know key buzzwords. Its more for technologists, CTOs and others interested in how things work with regards storage networking.

As a reader of Wiley books since my undergraduate days, many years ago, I have come to respect and enjoy their high quality, and have, over the years, purchased and recommended quite a few, both for the companies I've worked with and for my personal professional library.

It is therefore a deep disappointment for me to read "Storage Networks Explained", originally published in German, and translated to English in 2004.

My disappointment is not with the technical contents - the book was obviously written by experts in the field, and give a complete (if slightly dated) review of the field of storage networks. In terms of contents, my expectations are fulfilled. However, the translation of the book from the original was done in a sub-standard manner, resulting in an uncomfortable reading experience. All too often, my concentration was broken by having to re-read sentences and trying to understand what the original authors were trying to say in German, as the phrasing in English is awkward and unnatural at best, and ofter plainly wrong.

The information I needed was there, but getting it was made harder than necessary due to the poor translation and editing. A newer book that's up-to-date and even a bit better in terms of style and ease of reading will well-deservedly remainder all the copies of this work. Until such a book is out, non-German speakers who wish to get a decent overview of the field will have to struggle with this.

How to write a book and make money: Find the hot topic of the day - today's is terrorism, put in your own pet theory or idea about the topic - the author's is how terrorists can use steganography to communicate and finally write a lot of fluff to combine the two. The author has written a poor story, thrown in liberal screenshots and lengthy explanation of how they work.

The author knows enough about steganography but know little about the terrorists and their culture. Of course, today any fool can sell a book about "terrorism" and most do.

I am quite familiar with steganography. This book is just a nonsense.
Maybe, the fictional story could be worth of it, but how pathetic. She plans it all in detail. Then suddenly, she turns herself in to authorities, but does not get an idea to keep in contact with co-conspirators to help stop them.

"Hacking a Terror Network" tells a convincing tale of Cyber Terrorism. This fictional story uses communication technology readily available today to spin a fascinating tale a potential scenarios for any criminal element and easy enough for the novice computer user. By combining emotional motivation and computer savvy, terrorist threats press US counterterrorism teams to keep ahead of electronic means of causing death and destruction.
The only thing missing are sidebars describing instructional exercises for the reader to try out these easily used technologies.
The reader might enjoy supplementing this book with another Syngress book, Zero-Day Exploit, to continue reading cyber terrorism scenarios.
The author talks about applications to use and you don't even have to google them on the internet. They're included on the accompanying CD. Additionally, Syngress gives you 4 free e-booklets online.

I found this book to be interesting both as a fiction and technical material. The plot develops around a very hot topic of these days - the war on terrorism. Unlike your "conventional" terrorists, the characters in this book use Internet and computer technology to secretly plan and launch an attack against the US.

The tools discussed in this book were new to me, although I've heard of something similar in the past. I found it difficult at times to adjust to this interesting combination of suspense fiction and the technical explanations of how certain tools work. However, overall information obtained is quite useful and encouraged me to further research the topic of "covert channels" and stenography. Besides a few grammar errors and typos that were missed by the editors, this is a good introduction to stenography, especially for computer enthusiasts and professionals. If you are looking for a page turner fiction novel you may want to look somewhere else.

There are some important topics in cyber-security that are very important, but may not require an entire book to cover in detail. When it comes to online communication using "covert channels" and "stegenography", Syngress does what is excels at: they cover the topic in the context of a fictionalized narrative to give it a "real world" context. While not as excellent as some of their other efforts in this genre, Syngress still does a good, but not perfect, job with Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels (364 pages , SYNGRESS, 2005, ISBN 1-928994-98-9).

The context of this book is a revenge-motivated terrorist attack, borne out of the first Gulf War, against targets on the United States. Some might question how realistic the scenario is or is not, but the book weaves a story which may ring all too true today. The threat of terrorism is real, and it could/would be too easy for people with evil purposes to use covert channels to plan and coordinate an attack.

Without giving away a surprising plot twist, it is hard to envision how the scenario lain out in this book could be realistic, but then again no one on the streets envisioned 9-11 or the recent bombings in London either. What Rogers does in this book is effectively explain the different types of covert channels that can be used, tools that are readily available to use the channels, and tools that are available to detect their use. He also demonstrates that how, without a stroke of luck, it may be virtually impossible to detect the use of these channels.

The book is not written as tautly as it could be and at times you might want to say "Just get to the point!". And there are some items in the book, such as the presence of an Internet Cafe in Iraq in 1991, that require as they say in Hollywood, the "willful suspension of disbelief". Put these things aside and you will learn some new things and technologies you may not have known about before.

The bottom line is that without luck, nobody on the Internet will know you are a dog.

The Scorecard

Par on an Average Par 4

I represent the publisher, so please take my rating with a grain of salt, but do note that there is an updated version of this book: Alan F. Benner's "Fibre Channel for SANS" published in March 2001, and it is available from Amazon.com

The "review" from the publisher merely mentions that there is a more recent edition of this book available. In reality, this old edition should be recalled, as some of the information is completely wrong. For instance, the author refrences a FC Level of 1.5. No such Level exists! Not now, not ever. The author completely made it up. If you relied on this book as a reference to prepare for a protocol-level cert exam, you would likely get many items incorrect due to this book.

I am disappointed with the presentation of information in this book. In a word, it is horrible. It sorely needs an update. It was written in 1995. That makes it about 2 generations old as far as Network Technology is concerned. That is understandable, but it gets worse from there. Figure 6.1 Defined Ordered Sets for Frame delimiters on page 95 is incorrect and violates the Fibre Channel Physical and Signaling Interface (FC-PH) revision 4.3. The figures are sloppily drawn. For example, Figure 16.3 Loop Port State Machine state diagram, simplified has graphic which covers text. Personally, I find the diagram difficult to follow; others may not. The text may be easy to follow for those familiar with Fibre Channel, however, I am using this text to learn, and I find it more confusing than other texts. I think I have written enough to convey my opinions of this book. ;[

The Fibre Channel book by Alan Benner is an excellent book. Understanding the theory behind the Fibre Channel protocol is necessary before deploying a SAN into your infrastructure. This book gave me a look inside the protocol, from a designers perspective. Considering how technical the subject of the book is, I found the book incredibly easy to follow, and the Figures represented in the book were precise and representative of the text. This is definitely recommended reading for any System Administrator looking to stay in demand.

Very disappointed. I purchased Introduction to GSM, Introduction to GPRS and EDGE, Introductin to EVDO all by Lawrence Harte.

All three were very superficial, with most of the material in each publication being used in the others. This is not serious publication - you can get as much information just searching the web. Save your money for serious texts.

I do not recommend any publications by this author.

This book is a great starting point for someone who needs to learn about EVDO systems quickly. It is a good reference for our instructors who teach
telecom billing and communication courses. The diagrams were very helpful.

This book provides descriptions of the key parts of GSM systems. It is a bit technical for a sales person but is a great reference to have. What a person doesn't understand today, they might understand after being around the technology. The diagrams are a little cartoonish but helpful. A good read and a good resource.

Mr. Smith's background as a programmer and software marketer is apparent and his coverage of technology related security concepts is simple and straightforward. The coverage of information security is somewhat rudimentary. The coverage of physical security is, to be kind, inadequate.

This book is a basic security primer written by a technology professional and, if marketed as such, would be fine. However, the inclusion of physical security in the title is misleading and the book is terribly disappointing. Do not purchase this book if you are looking for even a cursory understanding of physical security concepts, the business case for physical security or are looking to present on the topic of physical security to the boardroom.

Mark Smith does a great job of breaking it down in this concise and comprehensive overview on security. It's all here - principles, policy and tactics in addition to case applications for specific industry segments. Also, the appendix provides a wealth of references for further drill down.

I highly recommend having a copy of this quick read as a security checklist then keeping it on your reference bookshelf.

I am not a Christian Scientist and have no stake in the church arguments over media which Bridges documents.

As I read the book, I was interested in the larger issues Bridges claims she will address: how do events at the CS Monitor reflect the situation of all US journalism?

Sadly, Bridges seems so interested in defending the actions of her colleagues and herself that she doesn't really examine this larger issue.

Also, the writing is terrible. The sentences are poorly constructed, and Bridges uses way too many unnecessary adjectives (perhaps forgetting that adjectives cannot substitute for evidence). By the time I finished, I felt that if she used the word "upshot" ("The upshot was . . .") one more time I would have to run screaming from the room.

The only reason to read this book is to get a glimpse of the primary sources Bridges cites. Read the quotes and the footnotes--I'd skip the rest.

Once again, the Monitor's fundamental intent, as expressed by Mary Baker Eddy, is overlooked and not understood--by the author and Netty Douglass et al.

The object: "To injure no man but bless all mankind," cited repeatedly in MTN, is the corollary, following the fundamental activity and statement made in the omitted first part of the quote from the Monitor's first editorial, where MBE says, speaking of the periodicals she founded: "The next I named 'Monitor,' to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent."

Although the Monitor's mission was never to prosyletize or be a missionary for the C.S. Church institution, it clearly is meant to further the underlying principle, i.e. Christian Science.

It is this blind spot that made the broadcasting project--the way Jack, Netty, et al went about it--destined to fail from the start.

While always putting things in the most positive light for Jack and Netty, from a cursory reading it seems MTN does cover most of the important points.

I was very dissappointed in reading this book. There was more fact and information in the notes then the actual text, I felt the author was giving an over view of the other resource material she had found.

I also found the book very one-sided. Defending the actions of the two key players. As someone who was also an employee of the Monitor Channel during this time, I was amazed at how many inacurate facts there were!

As I finished the book, the only question I had was why did I read it?

Bridge's book sheds real light on a fascinating story that only an insider such as she could tell with such authority and understanding. A most useful case-study of a fallen communication enterprise that seemed doomed from the start. This is a book that every broadcast professional and academic should read. Well-documented and thoroughly compelling.

Susan Bridge provides information about a relatively "cloaked" period in the Christian Science movement, and although her book wasn't intended to inform church members about the happenings as they related to the church itself, it is an excellent vehicle for doing so.The book is a good read for those individuals interested in the area of media and the news, even though it draws some bleak conclusions for positive changes in the future in the way we receive our news. The recent Walters/Lewinsky interview is a chilling example of the direction we might be headed, but it is a must reading for every Christian Scientist who is interested in what took place in Boston from approximately 1984-1992.I think it is well written, well documented, and very interesting. I also felt she was fair in her writing and kept as impartial perspective about the entire situation as possible under the circumstances. She leaves questions to be answered by each reader. Was it a good direction? Was it overly expensive? Would it have been an additional or even a replacement medium for providing the quality of news Mary Baker Eddy desired when she founded the Christian Science Monitor--a newspaper that has not broken even financially for decades? Were individual personalities responsible for the failure? What other factors came into play in this whole scenario that impacted the concepts and their implementation.It certainly will make you think.

Concur with the prior reviewers...Using this as an example, Harte has no business referring to himself as an author. Admittedly, I had low expectations for a technical text under 100 pages; but it failed to even meet my low expectations. It would have been more valuable and had more substance if it just listed every CDMA2000-related specification and synopsized its purpose.

Very disappointed. I purchased Introduction to GSM, Introduction to GPRS and EDGE, Introductin to EVDO all by Lawrence Harte.

All three were very superficial, with most of the material in each publication being used in the others. This is not serious publication - you can get as much information just searching the web. Save your money for serious texts.

I do not recommend any publications by this author.

This book is soooo bad. It has so many flaws, it doesnt explain anything, it show some ideas of EVDO, but never puts together the concepts. You just better find an EVDO Tutorial over the web rather than buying this book. Lawrence Harte, the author of the book, should be ashamed for publishing such an unprofessional book.