Networks Books

First off, I'm a bit bias. Dr. Saadat was my professor and we used his book. The book was really easy to follow and had great examples. I actually learned a lot and retained it.

One of the best Power Systems books. Very simple and clear examples. Excelent for students and experts.

The 2nd edition is almost the same as the first edition. But the book still the best power system book I have ever seen. The book is well written and organized with lot of practical examples. The author has a detailed Matlab codes for T.L. parameters, faults, load flows, optimal dispatch, and stability including the Kron reduction technique for multi-machine system. These codes can mange up to 200 bus power system. The only thing missing in this book is the protection part.

I found this book excellent. The author has gone through so much work to develop such a well written text. I have been studying power systems for years and I certainly recommend this text to all those who are seriously considering a carrier in power systems engineering. The use of MATLAB to perform analysis is original and very useful.
Well Done!

The author's presentation of power system analysis is very appropriate for those studying the subject for the first time. Concepts are presented clearly and the examples illustrate well the discussion in the text. The mathematical level is easily within reach for senior electrical engineering students. One very helpful feature of this book is that answers are supplied for practically all of the end-of-the-chapter problems. Also, the author makes good use of MATLAB even from Chapter 1, and SIMULINK on the book's latter part.

This is by far the best book available on DNS. It is very informative and yet the reading style is entertaining (not fluffy though). Overall, it is a joy to read. The author is able to communicate effectively to both the expert and the novice. Look no further than here for a great DNS reference book. Way to go Ron Aitchison!

After reading several of the chapter sections at the authors website, I needed a bit more understanding about how to install and configure Bind 9 onto our Windows box. I wanted to use Bind on old hardware running NT4. I fired off an email to the author and got several pointers that fixed the problems I was having. I realized the pointers he had given me were all covered in his book. After purchasing the book, I not only found out lots of stuff about what all the parameters are but also discovered how to manage bind over the LAN in a secure way. This book is a must have for anyone that wants to use Bind 9 for the first time. It has helped me several times already.

The Domain Name System is a critical component of any large network or any computer connected to the Internet. While a home user would not need to setup a DNS server, business networks of any significant size would benefit from an internal server, DNS caching router or other components. This book takes the reader through a very good explanation of DNS and BIND, how it works, how to set it up, how to test it, and how to troubleshoot it. There are many books on DNS and BIND but most either assume a certain level of prior knowledge, provide theory without implementation information, or provide implementation information without any theory so you have no idea how to troubleshoot a problematic implementation. Author Ron Aitchison does an excellent job of discussing both theory and implementation in this book so you end up with a thorough education. He even covers the implementation of a secure DNS server. This book actually takes the reader from a level of complete novice through advanced DNS administrator and does an excellent job of it. Pro DNS and BIND is highly recommended and one of the better books on the subject available.

Ron Aitchison's Pro DNS and BIND packs a whopping 550 pages of material which is easy to read for the novice or ongoing DNS administrator, and which is very well written (I greatly enjoyed the author's style). After a short introduction in which I learnt some interesting facts about the provisioning of the root servers, the author implements a first zone describing the necessary concepts such as resource records, queries and zone transfers very clearly, followed by the different types of DNS setups (master, slave, caching, forwarding and stealth servers); these are covered in depth in chapter 7. Chapter five covers IPv6 and its relevance to BIND. Throughout the book, references to other DNS server implementations are given, but the primary focus is of course BIND 9.3.0.

Aitchison leads the reader through detailed installation of BIND on Linux, FreeBSD and even Windows (ISC has an installer for Windows in its portfolio), after which common DNS tasks are discussed (how to delegate a subdomain, how to define SPF records, etc. read it on-line here) as well as a chapter on tools.

The third part of the book is dedicated to securing DNS configurations with topics ranging from simple administrative issues (chroot jails) through securing DNS updates and zone transfers with TSIG and DNSSEC.bis which is covered very extensively in chapter 11.

Chapters 12 and 13 provide extensive commented references on BIND configuration and Zone files. There is of course plenty of on-line reference information on these two topics (including the author's very good DNS for Rocket Scientists) but I like to have reference information on hardcopy (in the event my DNS servers fail, and I can't reach the on-line documentation :-) )

In part 5 the author shortly covers programming with the BIND API and the resolver libraries, and he follows that with an interesting chapter on DNS Messages and Records, good to have if you want to sniff your way through DNS traffic.

The publisher's web site carries a sample chapter as well as the source code to the book which is also available in TAR format on the author's web site together with complementary information and pointers to further resources.

My only complaint about this otherwise excellent book is that on two or three occasions I read a paragraph that I thought I'd just read before; some duplication must have taken place (or I was tired). For the next edition, I'd like to read a chapter on interoperability between BIND and Microsoft Windows DNS servers, specifically regarding DNSSEC.

This book is an absolute must have for anybody who needs to understand DNS in the first place (irrespective of the implementation he or she plans to use), and it is a must have for a systems administrator who is either intending to deploy or has already deployed BIND 9.3. I wish I'd read this book before the first mentioned above.

while the reference from Paul Albitz/Cricket Liu is sometimes hard to read and long winded, this text from Mr. Aitchinson covers everything and yet stays very clear and simple. I could configure and start a caching only DNS server in less than 30 minutes (well, after omitting the first few introductory chapters ;-). If you want to look up sth., there is also a big reference section. There is also an errata-page at:
http://www.netwidget.net/books/apress/dns/notes.html

I also found this book *much* more useful as the first, because of the fact that it is much more up-to-date!
I can recommend this book to everyone, who
*) wants to install/configure/start/maintain a DNS server
*) wants to get informed about the Domain Name System in general

Up to now, this book is really an insiders' tip!!

This book has some great examples to help you take your Sharepoint environment to the next level. It cover all the major Office Applications and includes great code ready to be built and implemented. Not for the beginner but perfect for the System Admin or .Net developer looking to take their sharepoint skills to the next level.

SharePoint as an application development platform is long on potential, short on guidlines. Pro SharePoint Solution Development guides the user through applciation development techniques that leverage the infrastructure (security, doc management, database access, navigation) of SharePoint to deliver application functionality. This book does not assume the reader is an advanced .Net developer, nor does it treat the reader as brand new to the concepts of application development. It cuts directly to the use of built in features and the creation of custom features and how to bind them together to create solutions.

This book offers an indebt review of how SharePoint fits in the Microsoft Office ecosystem. It delivers a variety of advanced examples, richly illustrated with sample code, downloadable from Apress, and step by step instructions and illustrations in the book itself.

The organization of the book is very convenient and the first four chapters allow the reader to brush up his knowledge about MS Offices and SharePoint with abundant external links. Each consecutive chapter after that represents a standalone example based on a real-world scenario. The examples are focused on the integration with a particular MS Office product. For example Chapter 5 demonstrates a scenario where MS Word integrates with SharePoint and Chapter 9 shows how to construct PowerPoint slides using content stored in a SharePoint list. Every example starts with an introduction and walkthrough, which allows the reader to start reading the chapter directly without losing context.

The complexity of integrating products of the MS Office family in enterprise solutions requires quite a bit of knowledge and experience thus I do not recommend this book to beginners in SharePoint and MS Office programming. While this book has a plenty of introductory and historical information about MS Office development and SharePoint customization, it does not emphasize on important steps of professional SharePoint development such as creation of SharePoint solutions, list and site template customization and provisioning. However if you are already familiar with SharePoint (WSS 3, MOSS 2007) concepts such as solutions, features, workflow etc., this is the book to put all these features in the context of enterprise applications.

The software and hardware requirements for the examples in this book are quite high, so if you want to be able to implement them on your own you need to allocate some time to prepare a system with MOSS 2007, MS Office 2007 Enterprise, VS 2008 Professional or Team Edition and for the first example MS Office 2003. In addition there are several manual actions, which require a bit more time.

Something, which may not be obvious from the title, is the heavy use of the new MS Office document standard - Office Open XML (commonly referred to as OOXML or OpenXML). This was my first exposure to this format specification and I found its use throughout the book very useful.

Overall this book is of great value to intermediate and advanced developers, working on enterprise applications based on the MS Office system or integration projects with third party vendors. The examples can be read independently and each one of them not only demonstrates the implementation of a particular scenario, but also provokes ideas for other projects.

This is the 5th book on MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0 that I have bought so far and it is the best as far as SharePoint development. Each chapter after chapter 4 describes a real-world project for integrating SharePoint with Office. The book assumes that you already understand SharePoint development and .NET programming. You can download the code and I have not had any errors compiling it so far. The book makes heavy use of the System.IO.Packaging namespace and so there are many examples generating xml-based office documents. This book gets straight to the point with lots of code. I highly recommend it.

I am involved with SharePoint developer education so I buy and scan through every single SharePoint title when it becomes available. There are plenty of SharePoint books out today that all cover the same basic topics. This book was special because it had a significant amount of content that I have not seen anywhere else. In particular, I like the way this books explains how a developer can integrate Office 2007 office applications together with SharePoint 2007. It goes beyond the typical 'hello world' examples and offers plenty of gems that could only have been gathered from real-world experience rolling out projects in a production environment. Congrats to Ed and Susie!

This man is a teacher of mind and soul
His destiny is to help us unfold
The gifts God has laid in our control
He writes of physical laws to success
He lives and breathes each law he bestows
Take heed to the words you read in his books
They will transform your heart and soul.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Drew Earl, and more importantly listening to him speak. His stories were inspirational, and he truely conveyed the feeling that his sole purpose for being there was there to help me (us). I got the same feeling while reading this book 2 days later. If the lessons in this book do not help you to make positive changes in your life, it is only because you do not want to change.

Upon opening this book, one will immediately realise the lack of a content page. According to the author, the book was written in this way so that one would have to read the entire book cover-to-cover in order to make any sense of it, and he is confident that anyone who wants to know, badly enough, what network marketing is all about will do exactly that.

There are twenty principles of network marketing in the book, and these can be grouped broadly into service and leadership categories. In the service category, the author explains the higher concepts of service to humanity and why this is essential to success in network marketing. In the leadership category, he justifies the hard work and sacrifices a person must make in order to become the most vaunted of leaders: a leader of people.

Throughout the book, the author cautions against falling into the habit of the ways of the false leader, or Zirconia as he calls them. He lashes out critically against people who would call themselves leaders and then leave all the work for their followers to do. He stresses time and again that while a true leader, a Diamond, and a Zirconia look the same on the surface, only the Diamond will truly succeed in uplifting the lives of others, while the Zirconia will leave a trail of failed ventures as he shifts to the next opportunity offering easy rewards for almost no work.

The book itself is easy to read, with a flowing, conversational style of writing that makes one feel that the author was speaking to one directly. Personal anecdotes, from the lives of the author himself and the people he has personally known, as well as those of famous personalities in human history, are interspersed throughout the book, and provide a touching and human side to the concepts they are used to convey.

All in all, this book is an excellent read and is a must-have for the serious network marketer wants to succeed, not only in terms of money, but also in terms of improving the lives of others, and leading them on to greatness.

My name is Gabriela Earl. I am the wife of the author and am his biggest fan, and have been for the past 29 years. He practices what he preaches, but most importantly truly cares about people. He lives his life by the motto that "The things we do for ourselves die with us...and the things we do for others, carry on for all eternity". The book will change your life and will inspire you to get out of the city of compromise and onto the city of possibilites. This is a must read not only for network marketers but for everyone wanting to excel in any endeavor. We have lived this book together in the past 25 years of working in the network marketing industry . It is not a how to book, it is a book of who you need to become to work your busienss through attraction vs. promotion. Follow the precepts of this book and you will begin to attract everything you ever wanted in life...We have...

After my 5th time in 5 weeks listening to Drew's "Psychology of Network Marketing" I honestly feel I'm on my way to a successful future. I'm 48 years old and have tried many times to follow through on building an organization in MLM. With Drew's help I'm focused on achieving my goals by reading them daily and constantly writing 'positive affirmations' to keep my attitude soaring. It is easy to understand why he is such a success in life.

Very well writen book which provides the reader with a strong understanding of UMTS. The content is suitable for both the beginner and more experienced engineer. Back-to-basics are included in addition to more detailed descriptions. The book is well structured and the practical emphasis demonstrates the author's experience in the subject.

An excellent book packed with information. The content is clear and comprehensive. It has provided me with a good understanding of both HSDPA and HSUPA. The book serves as a very good reference for signalling procedures with the complete content of messages included. I highly recommend this one.

I've been to a few training courses presented by Chris Johnson. This book provides a good reflection of his knowledge and clear presentation style. I like the way that a lot of the descriptions are based upon following the flow of data through the protocol stack. There are some good examples of what happens to the speech and data service bits as they are passed between layers. I like the tables which illustrate how the number of bits change during each phase of physical layer processing. This is shown for DCH as well as HSDPA and HSUPA connections. Some parts of the radio network planning sections are similar to those found in other books but there are sections which do not appear elsewhere, e.g. analysis of maximum neighbour list lengths. Link budgets are also presented and described in depth.

This book includes a really good chapter on signalling procedures. Each of the procedures is described in a lot of detail. Signalling flows are shown, but also the content of each message is shown and discussed. All of the most important procedures are included - connection establishments and handovers. Good to have SMS transfer explained too. Also finding the chapters on HSDPA and HSUPA very useful. Explanations are clear and start from the basics but also go into detail. Provides a good explanation to how data is transfered and at what data rates.

Well writen and well presented. Chapters on HSDPA and HSUPA are very good. Summary bullet points at the start of each chapter are a nice idea - good for revision when you're trying to remember everything. Also useful to have the relevant 3GPP specifications listed there. Chapter on logical, transport and physical channels includes plenty of detail. Signalling procedures chapter very comprehensive. Good to see link budgets described in detail. This book should be valuable to anyone working on or studying UMTS.

I am surprised and pleased with this book, covers all the current technologies in use and in development for RBB, in a technical way and also in a commercial and marketing way, that combination result in a very complete and good book, I strongly recommend it

George's writing style is excellent. He merges concepts from broadcast, telephony, data, and video with ease. Although the topic can be quite technical, George's focus is on the basic engineering challenges to solved. Business types will love his economic and market analysis.

I have to thank my friend Paul at Cisco who gave this book to me as a token of our friendship. I enjoy the book's content and author's style of presentation very much. To investors interested in the high tech industry, this book offers a comprehensive view on the latest technology and development which will have profound impact on the outcome of voice, data and vedio delivery infrastructure and market in the future.

This book is very clearly written and a very good reference for anyone in the broadband arena.

The author does a great job of condensing everything to do with broadband while staying on track and not straying from the subject.

Great book.

An excellent summary of the several broadband technologies that are currently searching for a marketplace. This book is notable for it's strong sense of organization and it's consistent level of detail. If you're interested in broadband network technology this book is a good stepping off point for something more technical. If you're trying to learn enough to make a buck by betting on a winning technology, this book will give you the basic understanding of broadband networks that you will need to decipher the steady stream of press releases that are coming from the companies that are betting millions on the broadband marketplace. I liked the book.

I have many texts on RF Engineering and quite a few on wireless networks. This has become the first port of call for understanding Antennae and propogation in this physically treacherous environment. Many real life designs rely on multi-path propogation to ensure access points and other such devices work. This is not often clear in the documentation however. This book will help you solve this thorny problem in your network and show you how to battle reflections effectively. It has the right amount of mathematics to make some predictions reasonably possible. A far cry from the norm in this rapidly evolving field.

A must have for any wireless designer. The author's ability to clearly explain fundamental RF concepts makes this a perfect book for any student of radio. His real world examples, also makes this an indispensable tool for the accomplished professional. The pictures and graphs are extremely insightful and clearly illustrate the points that the author is trying to make.

The author's ability to break down complex technical concepts makes this a great book but the practical insights, into the real-world constraints of both indoor and outdoor networks, makes this book a must have for the engineering professional. I have not found one resource like this that covers so many practical issues faced by wireless designers today. For people designing and installing WiFi networks, this book provides a single resource for the propagation characteristics of common building materials. Carefully researched and clearly explained this is undoubtedly the best book I have found on modern day wireless and 802.11 networks.

Dan Dobkin has accomplished something close to impossible: an extremely useful, intelligent and entertaining book on Wireless Networks. This book is a must for wireless network designers or those just interested in how they operate.

The book is filled with extremely useful technical information on wireless networks and all of the building blocks. His real world network application examples compliment the detailed technical derivations. Dobkin writes this book as if he is telling a story without the stuffiness of typical technical books. The Illustrations are very well thought out and help to get the complex ideas across to the reader. Dobkin adds interesting historical facts and comical quips to the detailed technical discussions to make the journey through this book interesting and rewarding. He manages to convey a sense of enthusiasm for technology throughout the text.

Very few authors manage to write such useful technical books without putting the reader to sleep. Dan Dobkin is one of the few to have accomplished this feat. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and look forward to his next creation!

Dan Dobkin has managed to encompass in this book information that most people would take 15 to 20 years to learn. This book is useful not only for engineers researching wireless networks but also for the engineer/student that needs to understand the fundamentals of all aspects of radio systems.
This really is a reference book to keep on the shelf !
The section on Antennas is particularly informative and should be read by all involved with the RF medium.
Great work !

Probably the best book on the market for anyone affiliated with designing and/or deploying wireless networks. The book is very well written. Every curiousity of RF can be found in this book. The illustrations are great and the book is full of real world networking examples. Anyone planning on designing or operating a wireless network should have this book nearby.

Knight's Risk,Uncertainty and Profit(RUP) is a classic work ,especially with respect to Knight's analysis of the distinction between risk and uncertainty and the role each plays in the decision making calculus of the entreprenuer or the firm.For instance,Knight recognized that the negative impact of uncertainty could be reduced for those firms that were able to increase their size and get larger and larger over time.Advertising would allow firms to deal with the uncertainty of consumer responses to the introduction of new products over time ,as well as to changes in consumer preferences.Knight was the first to clearly recognize that economic profit is the return to the successful entreprenuer or owner of the firm to compensate them for the bearing of uncertainty.Knight's analysis of the connection between uncertainty and economic profit corrected the errors of Ricardo and Marx,who regarded economic profit as an unearned surplus .Keynes's integration of expected economic profit into the specification of his aggregate supply function,Z,where Z =P+wN(P equals expected economic profit),can be traced back to Knight's earlier discussions.It is strange that economists still are having trouble specifying Keynes's Z function nearly 70 years after the publication of the General Theory in 1936.However,Knight's theoretical analysis of uncertainty at both the micro and macro level is not as impressive as Schumpeter's analysis of uncertainty in his Theory of Economic Development(1912)or of the path breaking analysis of John Maynard Keynes in chapters 6 and 26 of the A Treatise on Probability(1921).In this latter book,Keynes operationalized a quantitative method of dealing with uncertainty(insufficient weight of the evidence,w)by means of his conventional coefficient of risk and weight,c.This coefficient allows a decision maker to incorporate uncertainty and nonadditive probabilities into a technical analysis of decision making.The only author who comes close to Keynes is D.Ellsberg with his practically identical index to measure ambiguity called rho.There are still some unanswered questions that can be asked in this area of economic thought.Why didn't Knight cite the earlier work of Joseph Schumpeter on the risk versus uncertainty distinction?Further,why didn't Keynes cite both Knight and Schumpeter in his chapters 12 ,17 and 22,where he discussed the issue of the effect of uncertainty on investment in new capital goods and on stock market speculation?

Even though the recent research in microeconomic theory has paid attention (somewhat reluctant in my opinion) to the topic of the "uncertainty", i.e. the Knightian uncertainty, it has not been successfully incorporated in the main theoretical framework, yet. The one of the evidences may be that we still cite D. Ellsberg's paper in QJE as the one of the most important work in this field: it is like citing Keynes' "General Theory" in every microeconomic paper as in 1950s and 1960s.

The book is pleasant to read: it is full of insights, usually forgotten by now, including the complemental tendency of the theoretical and empirical works in economics. The most important accomplishment is that he argued that the exisence of the "uncertainty", the event whose probablity cannot be estimated priori or from empirical data, explains the instablity of the perfect competition, the (lucklustre) justification for the monopoly and the oligopoly, and the superiority of the private property system (capitalism). It is noticable that many phenomenons metioned in the book can be still applicable now, and the last part implies the author's thought regarding to the path of the capitalism, which is explored in more depth in Schumpeter's work despite the differences in two economists' predictions.

Knight is one of the economist who lived in the transition of classical into neoclassical economics. The book predicts the emergence of more mathematical economists, but cannot escape from the influence of the former. The same thing can be said of the works of Schumpeter, Viner, and Veblen. Despite being one of the most famous economists, he and Schumpeter has no student who followed their lines of works: is it because their imaginative ways in conducting the reserach, or because of the trends in economics which trapped their students? (Stigler was a student of Knight, but which interest do their works share, except for their interests in history of economic thoughts?)

It is worth reading because it reminds of what economics is or should be about, not because it prescribes the solution which could not be found in the modern economic works. We are witnessing the transition of several countries into the private economics with the mixed results. It should be noted that Hayek's work is the starting point in this field, the transition economics or the comparative economics, but Knight's work is more appropriate, pratical, and dynamical.

Thus, if you are uncomfortable with the current economics, want to explore more idiosyncratic works in economics and think about the big picture in the path of the society, or are tempted to diverge from the dullness of the business books in your bookshelf, then this may what you have been looking for. Unless you are struck with the optimism that cannot be easily found in the present.

This is the standard work in the field, give or take some stuff Keynes wrote on risk and capital.

This is the best work of economic theory I have ever read. There is no work in economics that evinces better judgment on the main issues or that does a better job of balancing theory with a sense for the facts. Knight begins by defending theoretical (that is, deductive) economics. Unlike the economic rationalists, however, Knight does not believe that theoretical economics can lead to precise results. The application of the "analytic method" must always be "incomplete," he argues. Theoretical economics thus can only deal with "tendencies," that is, "with what 'would' happen under simplified conditions never realized, but always more or less closely approached in practice." This methodology Knight describes as "the method of successive approximations." Knight also warns of the dangers of rationalism and the necessity of constantly checking one's results against the facts. "When the number of factors taken into account in deduction becomes large, the process rapidly becomes unmanageable and errors creep in... It is better to stop dealing with elements separately before they get too numerous and deal with the final stages of the approximation by applying corrections empirically determined."

Armed with the method, Knight proceeds to tackle several important problems in economics, especially dealing with the theoretical construct of "perfect competition." By always keeping his head firmly within the empirically real, Knight is able to bring a great deal of sound judgment to a number of issues. Knight had a keen sense of human nature and how human beings behave in the real world of fact. He knew that most economists had made men out to be far more rational than they really were. Businesses, he argued, did not merely seek to meet the needs of the consumers; no, they sought to create new needs through innovation, advertising, and even a sort of manipulative hypnotism. In this, Knight argued, we find both progress and abuse, civilization and fraud. Knight also brings a good deal of sense to the problem of interest, demonstrating the psychological inadequacy of all time-preference theories of interest. But Knight's most important contribution consists in his analysis of the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk, Knight argues, is a measurable probability that something could happen, like the probability that an individual will be struck by lightening or hit by a car. Uncertainty is a kind of immeasurable risk--e.g., predicting short term flucations in exchange rates. Knight's analysis is crucial to understanding economic reality. Knight's distinction between risk and uncertainty, for instance, explains why the rise of derivative securities in financial markets is so dangerous. Derivatives attempt to insure uncertainty, which is immeasurable, as if it were risk (which is measurable).

Frank Knight hit the ground running with his dissertation, which he published as Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Knight makes a simple but important distinction between quantifiable risk and uncertainty. The distinction between risk and uncertainty is important in understanding markets, profits, and entrepreneurship. Knight connects entrepreneurship with uncertainty and profit. These factors do not square well with conventional notions of perfectly competitive equilibrium.

Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit is a work of major importance. This book constitutes a serious alternative to the theories of entrepreneurship developed by Schumpeter and Kirzner. While most modern economists underemphasize entrepreneurship, Knight examines uncertainty and entrepreneurship as a way of bridging the gap between abstract theory and economic realities. Knight saw the obvious fact that we do not live in a world of perfect competition. He, like Shackle and Keynes, recognized that we must explain uncertainty if we are to ever understand how the capitalist system really works.

Knight was a major figure in the generation of interwar economists who sought to explain the dynamics of capitalism. Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit is indispensable to anyone who aims at understanding uncertainty and dynamics in microeconomics, along with the work of Schumpeter, Hayek, Coase, Kaldor, Mises, Lachmann, and Shackle.

We finally have a book that pulls several different IOS security strategies together. So many references prior to this one touch on these topics sporadically but I have yet to find a better resource that covers all the bases as does this one.

The things I like about this book:

So many authors tend to try to spread their subject matter out too wide and take too broad of an approach when writing about network security. Schudel and Smith didn't do that. Instead they focused on specific areas and worked diligently to stay on target. It was very refreshing to read a book that actually didn't wander off on tangential subjects on a regular basis.

As for actual subject matter I was very pleased to find a book that discussed the various "planes" within Cisco IOS. In my opinion Cisco has not been very good about documenting this subject and so this book has cleared up several knowledge gaps I had prior to reading it. All of the bits of information I've heard or read about in the past were pulled together in a clear and concise manner. It was also pleasing to see just the right amount of configuration "shows" rather than pages and pages of them.

I also was very happy that this book was not full of fluff. The authors used just enough background info to convey their message but did not go overboard in non-essential detail. As with any technical reference I prefer thorough and correct information but many times there is just too much description that just gets in the way.

Some reviewers stated that the authors repeated themselves within this book. For me this was not a negative. There are certain topics that I very much need repeated in order to retain it thoroughly and so this was not a problem for me. The repetitious content was neither significant nor time consuming so I consider it to be a positive rather than a negative.

The things I do not like about this book:

This is trivial but I would have much preferred a hardback book rather than a paperback. This is a personal preference of course but hardbacks tend to last longer for me.

That's just yet another great title from Cisco Press!. This book does a great job of logically dividing the overall router security into each logical context by way of describing the router's planes. I also found very elaborate and diverse "Further Reading" towards the end of each chapter very useful. I particularly liked the idea of overall structure and quality of contents in the book which relate to both a casual and an advanced reader!

Book is structured into four Parts;

Part I focuses on laying the foundation for the rest of the book. It achieves this purpose by talking about the Enterprise and SP network fundamentals. This also includes day-in-the-life-of-a-packet through various router switching mechanisms. Chapter 2 re-hashes the network security/threat models but does a nice job of dividing it into various aspects of architectures including various IP VPNs scenarios.

For an advanced reader, this should serve as a nice refresher!

Part II introduces you to real meat of router security, i.e., securing the router planes in both IP and MPLS networks. Authors do a good job of describing the details of each component. Chapters in this section contain working details and IOS configuration snippets to enhance the understanding of various concepts discussed. An advanced user will find all the details given here very useful, and prefer read them cover to cover.

Part III walks you through various case studies to further the concepts explained in the prior chapters. I particularly like the idea of covering both Enterprise and SP case studies. It provides use cases, application examples, and best practices guidelines for the key concepts discussed in the whole book

In Part IV, I very much like the idea of not just copying pasting the headers as-is, rather adding the security implications of each and putting them into its context. Cisco IOS to IOS-XR Security transition is also useful although to mostly SP audience.

This book discusses security as in Router planes for both IP and MPLS VPNs Security. A few times you can notice that authors are repeating themselves.

Overall, I strongly recommend this book to all network security engineers as MPLS (due to its inherent advantages and applications) is gaining momentum not only in the service provider space but also in the enterprise market segment.

Router Security Strategies is a book about protecting ip networks by dividing them into different segments. Network engineers for service providers and larger enterprise networks will benefit most from this manual.

Chapters 1 through 7 are not a cookbook that you can look up sample configurations, but a broad coverage of security concerns. The authors spend these chapters leading the reader to an understanding of how ip traffic can be broken down into different categories, and how to define them as well as the particular vulnerabilities each has.

Schudel and Smith describe a three dimensional way of looking at security. Whereas we may have previously thought of securing each interface in a path, this book explodes this view into a multi-dimensional paradigm of data, control, management, and services. Like parallel universes each must be addressed separately while maintaining a big picture of how each plane can affect the other. The data plane is the actual payload for applications. The control plane indicates protocols that keep the traffic flowing to their destination. The management plane concerns the network administrator's access to the equipment. Special features such as Virtual Private Networks and Quality of Service constitute the services plane.
Chapters 8 and 9 give case studies that include diagrams, numbered line configurations, with documentation.

Appendix B details of each section of IP, TCP, and other protocol packets with vulnerabilities for each part. This is the first time I have seen this type of break down and found it made several aspects of attacks clearer to me. There are several other appendices that cover the IOS XR image and an excellent section on security incident handling that one could use as an outline for their company to use. I give Router Security Strategy 5 stars.

Gregg Schudel's and David Smith's book, "Sec Router Security Strategies: Securing IP Network Traffic Planes (Networking Technology: Security)", provided some of the best layering of security technologies I've read to date. It provides the needed understanding of security concerns and the methods to control them, from the bottom of the stack within the box to the top, deep into the application layers. Because it includes both IT and SP network considerations, I'm able to recommend this to all my consulting engineers.

D. Stewart, Engineering Manager
DeBrick Consulting

Router Security Strategies (RSS) is the sort of Cisco security book I like to read. Some of you were surprised by my three star review of another recent Cisco security book -- LAN Switch Security (LSS). I suggest the authors of that book take a look at RSS as a model for writing a second edition of LSS. RSS is well-organized, very clear, and backed by plenty of actionable command syntax. Were it not for a tendency to unnecessarily repeat and summarize material, I would have rated RSS five stars. Nevertheless, anyone operating Cisco routers would do well to consider how RSS approaches the network security problem.

RSS focuses on ways to protect transit, receive, and exception IP traffic in the data, control, management, and service planes of Enterprise and Service Provider (SP) networks. That one sentence almost summarizes the entire table of contents, where Chs 4-7 cover the four planes, Chs 8 and 9 provide case studies for Enterprise and SP networks, respectively, and Chs 1-3 provide introductory and conceptual material. This is how to write a technical book! Tangential material appears in four appendices, and the authors keep the reader on track through the entire text.

RSS makes a compelling case for network security in a world where applications and Web 2.0 are all the rage. I believe many people who scoff at network security have no real idea of the complexities inherent in modern network infrastructure. Too many application-centric people take it for granted that they can reach whatever Web victim they're attacking; perhaps that is a credit to network engineers who've made their creations just work and not be the center of attention. Should attackers decide to focus on network infrastructure, RSS provides plenty of techniques for defending routers and even some switches. I enjoyed learning more about several uRPF techniques, Flexible Pattern Matching (FPM), Selective Packet Discard, Receive ACLS, Control Plane Policing, Dynamic APR Inspection (DAI), and CLI Views. Many of these methods exist to protect the network itself, not necessarily the endpoints. While the authors do mention a desire to protect hosts, I liked seeing such a focus on defending infrastructure. Perhaps "network security" should be a term transitioned to solely mean protecting network platforms?

I thought Appendix B would be the standard catalog of TCP/IP header diagrams, but I was pleasantly described to see a different approach. App B did depict IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, IEEE 802.3, and 802.1Q headers, but the authors provide a security implication for each field in these headers. I found that to be original and informative.

I subtracted one star for two aspects of the book which bothered me. First, the authors tend to use the term "threat" in a manner which is not consistent with real threat terminology. For example, p 87 speaks of "the potential threat and impact of a given vulnerability". Threat, impact, and vulnerability are all separate concepts. Ch 2, where such terminology appears, is titled "Threat Models for IP Networks." If you read the chapter it is a catalog of attacks, which sections titled "Resource Exhaustion Attacks", "Spoofing Attacks", and so on. Clearly Ch 2 is "Attack Models for IP Networks".

Second, although the material in RSS is excellent, the authors' tendency to repeat concepts wore me down. It's usually acceptable to begin a section by referencing and/or rephrasing material from an earlier chapter, or at worst farther back in the same chapter. It's simply annoying to be told the same material that appeared in the last paragraph. Any time the reader encounters "as stated in the last section" or similar, the authors should reconsider discussing the concept again. Edits like these wouldn't necessarily shrink the book that much, but the text would not treat the reader as if he or she has too short an attention span to remember what he or she just read.

Despite those two concerns, I still very much enjoyed reading RSS. You will probably get more out of the book if you have MPLS experience, but the authors provide plenty of background anyway. One of the best aspects of RSS is the presentation of extensive IOS syntax for all of the major concepts in the book. The authors do not talk about a technique and then leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how that idea should be implemented in IOS. Those trying to protect data, control, management, and service IP traffic will be well-served by reading RSS.

I don't setup a network without this book. It's as complete as any book I have on any subject.

Excellent. Plenty of examples with notes about the differences in the major flavors of Linux. Also, good background information on TCP/IP and basic strategy for including SAMBA in your network.

This book is now 2 years old but still the best reference available. I only say that because I have spent $$$ getting everything on the subject I can. With the recent changes in Microsoft licensing every sensible IT professional should be exploring alternatives. A SAMBA server is a great alternative. Mr. Litts book is all you need to go from knowing next to nothing to knowing enough to impress your geeky Network Admin friends.

This book is well written, clear and expansive. I didn't read it cover to cover (not at first anyway) I found pieces I needed, applied it, digested it, reviewed it and then went on to the next morsel I needed. If I missed something it was easy to find. By the way, it works with Win2K and WinXP neither of which is well documented by anyone anywhere.

I'm just glad they didn't charge me for what it was really worth! (most books I buy I quickly regret wasting the money unfortunately)

I recently installed Samba on a couple of Solaris servers in my organization to integrate these servers with our Windows NT domain. I needed a good reference book that could fill in the gaps left by the "man" pages, and other online docs. I looked at just about every other Samba book around but found something to my disliking with each of them. Even the O'Reiley book, which is very well rated, seemed disjointed and too cursory on some topics that were important to me. Then I saw Samba Unleashed and it was a solid winner! This book is EXTREMELY thorough and guides you through various configuration scenarios from beginning to end in great detail. Additionally, this book does an excellent job of explaining the underlying networking and communication principles involved. One could almost argue that this book is TOO inclusive because at 1200 pages, it's a monster! But I like a little hand-holding now and then and this book does exactly that. I also enjoyed the "special interest" sections one of which covered the nuances of Samba in a Solaris environment. This is the best Samba book out there right now, IMHO of course!

This book is awesome. Covers all of the basic Samba configuration as well as the "sticky" NT domain issues & Win2000 as well. Also provides real-world examples as well as some pretty complex issues I was never able to solve before. Holds your hand if you need it, but is also an outstanding reference book if you don't. Definitely recommended for anyone considering using Samba to replace WinNT servers on their network & needs real-world examples of interoperability does & don'ts and how-to's.