Data Communications Books

Prof. Day does a wonderful job decomposing, analyzing and reconstructing Internetworking (and the Internet) to plainly expose the good, the bad and the ugly. He colors the discussion with his insights and opinions concerning the decisions that went into creating the Internet from arpanet, although at times his color tastes of ax grinding.

The book is didactic, reading like a text book (although it probably will not see the light of day in university classrooms in its current guise). The style may put some readers off, but it is worth laboring through as the nuggets of truth and wisdom are worth the effort.

As a professional network architect, I strongly recommend this book to my peers as well as to educators currently teaching data networking and related topics.

Students of network architecture and teachers assigning reading will find PATTERNS IN NETWORK ARCHITECTURE an excellent survey which takes a different approach to solving network architecture issues. Seven basic, still unanswered, questions identified during the ARPANET's development reveals protocols, patterns, and common conflicts. The result is an outstanding guide for any advanced networking computer library.

When it comes to the kind of people involved in computer networks, there are four different types; the architects, engineers, IT professionals, and the end users. The architects design, the engineers build and maintain, the IT professionals configure for the unique business purpose, and the users work on it. This book is written by an architect for architects (and engineers aspiring to be architects). I'm doing this review with the perspective of someone who works mostly as an IT professional but spends about 35% as an engineer.

With many endeavors, it is easy to focus on the short-term with little or no emphasis on the long-term. John Day, as seen through this book, has both the unique experiences of designing and addressing very specific technical topics but also standing back and looking at how networks have evolved in perspective historically and where they need to go. This kind of work is indeed extremely important as our world becomes more interconnected every day, knocking down communication barriers and making more critical information available to people everywhere. We need to closely examine where and why the Internet has ended up where it is today so we can make the best long-term decisions for the future and that is exactly what John Day does in Patterns in Network Architecture.

This is very technical book that brings detailed processes together through both history and theoretical patterns. I can see this book being used in educational environments concerned with network architecture design (103 level classes) and organizations that place a high amount of significance on practical theory. I'm giving this book a five because of the amount of detail it covers and the flow he keeps throughout the book. Most writers covering this type of information get lost in the logistics but I felt like I was engaged at a lecture (instead of studying after a lecture).

In Patterns in Network Architecture, John Day has challenged the community of computer science to be truely a science by understanding the theory behind networking. The study of computer technology is abreviated by focusing on minor repairs to a system that may have fundamental flaws. Day encourages us to understand how we came to our present technology. Only through understanding of the underlying theories do we have any chance of moving toward a better, and possibly necessary, theory and practice.

I bought this book just out of interest to read a book about mail servers.
I have setup mail servers before (including virtual domains etc.).

I think this book sales point is the combination of the well thought structured contents, the nice contents flow, the good administration manners and well paced chapters based on simple proven solutions.

Its one of the books which you just cant put down till the end. The author has its very own idea of how to tell the story and its refreshingly different.

He is deliberately splitting up processes for server and client side point of view (f.e sending and receiving e-mails, filtering etc.)and goes the extra miles to bring his points accross.

The book describes all required functionality for basic, but full blown mail server systems (Virtual domains, clusters etc. are - if at all - only mentioned for completion purpose).

I did like that the authors have a good feeling on how much information first time system admins can take. Whereever possible the author gives basic explanations about the components described, warn to make backups before proceeding, and reasons the design decisions he made (keywords: backward compatibility with previous standards, work arounds etc.).

I also liked the motivating spirit, design considerations and experiences the author is sharing with the reader. I would give it 5 stars for junior system administrators, 3-4 for seniors.

Regardless of how many stars I give it, I find the story, how its told, its ideas and the spirit of it most impressive.

Full marks !!

This book was really informative from start to finish. I come from a Windows backround, and with the aid of this book, I now an running an open source mail server. I would highly recommend this book!

I am very impressed with this book. My interest in deploying my own email server has been peeked by recent events concerning privacy. While I am a programmer and I lean towards open source technologies, I was a little skeptical of my abilities of launching an open source email solution. After about four chapters of this book I relaxed because I realized the author was never assuming anything on part of the reader. Everything was thoroughly documented before me. Plus it's cool that the author adds in a little bit of history here and there on email. I definitely recommend this book. Just remember to get the most out of it, read it front to back.

If you're a beginner this is a great book. However, I guess I'm at a higher level than what this book aims for. For example, I don't need the whole history of email, nor do I need basics on getting around a Linux system. Also, this book used FC4 and sendmail, while I am a Debian guy who uses Postfix.

If you've never set up a server before, give this book a shot. Otherwise, look for something a little more advanced.

Also - Poor editing! See especially the discussion of IMAP servers (appears as "IMA" in several tables). There are other assorted errata as well. Nothing a second edition can't fix (from what I saw).

I've been using procmail in a basic way for a number of years. Whilst I've always meant to get around to using some of the more complicated (and useful) tools in the procmail toolbox, I've always been discouraged by the man pages.

This book explained those areas wondefully, and also showed me quite a few possibilities that had never occurred to me.

I think this book would be useful even if you already know procmail pretty well.

It would have got 5 stars, except for a couple of typos (involving quotes) that should have been caught. Mostly excellent!

Unlike prior reviewers, all I could do was spell Unix when I purchased this book-- a desperation measure, to be sure. But trust me, folks, this little beauty is worth every penny and then some. Long story short: About a year ago, I implemented procmail on my website-hosted server. Since then, the email I care about is auto-filed into text files; spam is a past-tense item; and my email box is joyfully mine again. Tip: grab the freebie plain text editor, CrimsonEditor(.com), and activate color-coding so you can SEE what you're doing while fashioning filters. ..... This text is easy to digest, so you'll likely have filters up and testing within a weekend. (P.S. run google searches for "procmail recipes", as you can't "break" anything while trying!)

Of course this was the only book available on the topic.
Fortunately this book is written very well, and is a very easy read. ( I finished this book cover to cover in 3 days )
That is not to say that the topic is not covered in depth.
I am an experienced UNIX programmer and would not have minded if the explanations on regular expressions and other UNIXy stuff shorter.
Its really amazing what procmail can do for us to make the life easier.
Its particularly relevant today, as more and more people are turning to Linux for their desktop.

I've been using procmail to filter my email for probably six or seven years, but in spite of reading whatever info I could find online, I was never able to get beyond the basics--until I came upon McCarthy's book. The online info seemed either too simpleminded or (more often) too complex. McCarthy's book has helped me enormously to create more sophisticated filter recipes, to understand what I'm doing, and to identify errors in my coding. I think the book would be helpful both to people new to procmail and to those with lots of experience who are looking to fine-tune what they already know. It's a terrific book!

An excellent explanation of what bandwidth is all about and what it means. Gives information not found in textbooks or industry documents. Answers such questions as why digital isn't always better than analog. Very well organized and treats subjects such as audio bandwidth and video bandwidth in different chapters. Filled with interesting tidbits, the book makes for some excellent reading. Some will see the book as leisure reading, others as something more serious. I saw it as both!

Wow, this is the best book I've ever read on a technological subject. If you are a non-technical person and want to know how your phone, cell phone, fax, modem,TV, radio, internet work in layman's terms; this is your book!. Better yet the book does all that in under 200 pages. Oh yeah, it also tells explains bandwidth and how we're never going to have enough despite what you may have heard about the coming "broadband revolution".

Although I've been involved in professional video production for the last 25 years in the non-technical area, I finally understand how a TV signal is transmitted and received after reading this book. I take back all the bad things I ever said about Microsoft, because they're the ones who published this outstanding book. I'm sadden that the author has past away. He had a unique ability to take very complicated stuff and explain it to liberal arts majors like myself and it's too bad he won't be around to write more. His clear thinking and economy of words is in very short supply in the technical book area...kind of like bandwidth.

If you've ever been puzzled by bandwidth or wanted to know more about it, this book is for you. For most of us, bandwidth is how much information we can get in front of us how quickly. But how does it happen? How can the same piece of copper wire that carries a low-grade voice signal to us at a mere four thousand bits per second also carry a high-quality mixture of images and text, even motion video, at over a million bits per second? What's the difference between the original bandwidth of radio broadcast frequency bands and bandwidth as we usually read about it in the popular media? Lu starts from the beginning, not neglecting the Stone Age, and carries us through the telegraph (including a widely-used system we had never heard of called the optical telegraph) into today's computer and telecommunication networks. In two chapters, "Thinking about Bandwidth" and "Looking at Bandwidth," he provides fascinating comparisons of bandwidths, proving, among other things, that it would be 640,000 times faster to fly 6 million CD-ROMs to Europe on a Boeing 747 than to upload them over the European E-1 lines under the Atlantic. But the book is practical, too, containing compact tables that define and compare various bandwidth measurements, starting with the hertz (cycles per second) for analog bandwidth and bps (bits per second) for digital bandwidth. Two chapters explain broadcast bandwidth, audio and video, the latter including brief explanations of TV standards, cable TV, color TV, and satellite TV. Datacasting is explained, too - how non-video data can be carried along with the video signal. In another long chapter, Lu explains Point-to-Point (rather than broadcast) Bandwidth, both wired and wireless transmission media and methods. A final chapter, devoted to bandwidth on the Internet, compares in human terms the ways to access the Internet (ISDN, DSL, cable modems, and wireless and satellite). Lu, the former science and technology editor for the Children's Television Workshop in the U.S., hopes that future bandwidth growth will be filled by better science content for children. He wonders whether bandwidth will be shared fairly among the world's peoples, rich and poor. He notes that bandwidth bottlenecks will persist and that the amount of bandwidth required for widespread video-on-demand and full-motion videoconferencing is not likely to arrive in this generation.

Cary Lu, a well-known science writer and editor, died shortly before the book was completed and final sections were written by his friends, New York Times computer columnist Stephen Manes and Adam Engst, author of the Internet Starter Kit series. Without in any way stinting on the details, this book aims for the general reader who needs help with technical explanations. It's also written by someone who has thought carefully about the significance of bandwidth. At whatis.com, where we continually fine-tune our definition of bandwidth, The Race for Bandwidth is a book that we have been unconsciously waiting for. Now that it's here, we plan to keep it very handy.

A great read -- very informative, not too technical (or, more properly, technical, but without jargon), and wide-ranging. Stephen Manes and Adam Engst deserve our thanks for shepherding it to completion after Cary Lu's death in 1997.

I find it unfortunate that the book is published as part of Microsoft Press's "Strategic Technology" series, whose other titles seem to be much more geek-specific: "Understanding ActiveX and OLE", "Understanding Electronic Commerce", "Understanding Intranets". Perhaps they are also aimed at a general audience, but since Lu's book covers so much about non-computing activities such as telegraphy, broadcasting, telephones, and even shipping and air flight -- stuff that should be interesting to people who aren't that computer-focused -- it seems that it's been relegated to a publishing ghetto from which it deserves to escape.

The cover doesn't help much, describing it as the "guide to key technologies behind fast Internet connectivity, wireless communications, video conferencing, and interactive television." It's more than that. It's a guide to so much that we use already today, not just these technologies of most people's future. The most interesting sections for me so far have discussed FM radio and shutter telegraphs, for instance.

This book should not live in the Computing section of bookstores, but in the general science section. It will surely outlive every other title in the

"Strategic Technology" series, because it deals with more universal topics in a less time-limited way. It would be sad to see it in the ubiquitous computer title remainder bins in a year or two, when it should really continue to be printed like other wonderful general science books such as James Gleick's "Chaos" or Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections.

It's also a shame that Lu wasn't around to promote the book. I think it could have reached a wider audience if he were able to do the promotional and talk-show circuit to entice people with its broad scope and easy fascination.

Don't think of this as just another "neato new technology" book. The book is good enough and concise enough that I read it voraciously in a little over a day. It's a miracle of brevity that rivals Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" guide to writing good English, and E. Annie Proulx's novels.

I'm amazed at how much is packed into a relatively slim volume, and how much of that information likely won't require revision for a long time. In particular, the early chapters discussing what bandwidth is and how it plays into the history of communications are, with a few exceptions such as pricing examples, pretty timeless.

Other sections seem (understandably, given the author's death before completion) a bit rushed and muddled, and could use clearing up. Some of the discussions of digital cell phone technology, and particularly granularity, seem dropped in from somewhere else, without proper context or explanation -- as if surrounding parts were missing.

The glossary is sometimes helpful, sometimes tautological -- having separate listings for each acronym, when the full definition is often a line or two away, also seems redundant.

Despite its flaws, I encourage you to buy it sight unseen. Not only will it outlast most more expensive technology titles you could purchase, it will give you a broad understanding which those books can't touch.

Even if you work for the phone company and live and breathe bandwidth every day, you'll certainly learn something -- such as why the world's best AM radio is made in New Zealand, that 18th century French optical telegraphs had bandwidths of a fraction of a bit per second, or that someone with graduate degrees in Physics and Biology once worked on "Sesame Street".

This is the most complete book on SAN's that I have come across. Combined with the focus of relating technologies, components, and configurations to business needs makes it a very valuable book. I have made it recommended reading for all of my engineers.

This is a very easy to understand yet comprehensive manual on resilient storage networks. Such networks are able to provide business continuation in the event that a significant disruption occurs. While there are other publications available like "Mission-Critical Network Planning" by Matthew Liotine, "Resilient Storage Networks" mainly focuses to storage media and ways to access it.

The first chapters of the book are generally educative: they cover various treats and requirements for data protection, data storage fundamentals, i.e. what is a bit and what is a byte, etc. Then it proceeds to storage networking access models and I/O interfaces. A large part of the book is devoted to fiber optics: cabling types, connectors and transceivers, link loss and power budgets, protocol drop, etc.

There are different schemes and illustrations that will help you to choose, at a higher level, to categorize the information that you store, and to build the best kind of network for it: small storage network, consolidation and intermix, metropolitan and wide are storage networks, large and high-performance networks, etc.

This is a very friendly and easy-to-understand volume. It is vendor-neutral and doesn't specify individual products and solutions. It looks at the big picture and emphasizes higher-level architectural strategies, based on existing network protocols, access models and interfaces.

This book is the most informative text on the market for those interested in building high available storage that is assessable across a network. Greg has written a book that is comprehensive in its scope yet readable by all those in the IT world. You will find a wealth of information on not only how to design a storage netork to meet the needs of your applications but also how to maintain it while providing the highest data availability.
I found of particular interest to me the abundance of examples on different configurations depending on a company's current infrastructure and how the connectivity could be modified to incorporate the most up to date networking technology.
I guarantee every time you read a section from this book you will come away with some new thoughts on implementing storage.

Resilient Storage Networks picks up where other books leave off. The author walks the reader through the fundamentals of storage networking and then dives deep into the data storage technologies used in building a resilient storage infrastructure. Business continuation, data management, protection and recovery, networking access interfaces and protocols, cabling, distance extension, storage I/O, and storage devices are among some of the topics discussed in detail. The author gives examples and "how-to's" in implementing appropriate solutions for different requirements. The book is particularly effective at illustrating best practice methodologies for designing and implementing storage networks. Excellent technical content and effective use of diagrams. Greg's experience and vendor-neutral approach shine through in this book.

This book is great at understanding the major components of a Public Key Infrastructure and the surrounding issues. You certainly would not walk away being able to set up a PKI, but you would be able to discuss it intelligently. If you are trying to come up to speed on PKI, this is the book for you. The subject is too big to cover everything in one book; so, I would also recommend picking up some more books that look at security issues specifically. One recommendation is E-Commerce Security by Ghosh.

A very well organized and useful reference text regarding encryption na dcertificates. I was pleased at the singling out of PG and its differences versus other X509 standards.

Ford and Baum do a great job explaining the ins and outs of public key infrastructures, covering both the technical and non-technical (legal, administrative, financial, etc.) issues with clarity and insight. Chapters 6 and 7 are especially worthwhile for those looking at the latest IETF PKIX standards.

Highly recommended - This is still the best intro book I've seen on PKI. Precisely and clearly written. Can't wait for the second edition, though, as this edition is getting a bit dated.

This is a very well done book that has made it much easier for teaching the concepts to new and aspiring administrators.

I managed to add TCP/IP, DHCP, and RAS to a buggy NetBeui Network in just a few days by following the examples in the book. Fell a bit short for me on the theory and advanced topics and I couldn't contact the authors, but it served it's purpose well. Glad I found it.

This is not only a book on how to configure TCP/IP functions on NT but also a very good overview of the internet protocol. Does an excellent job reviewing the IP protocol and all of its layers including some of the more interesting applications. Excellent reference material and a good read.

This is not a training manual (with chapter quizes, etc.). It is, however, the BEST source I've seen for grasping an understanding of TCP/IP (as in MCSE candidate). It is extremely well written, and the grahic illustrations are a tremendous help to someone like me (I'm a visual learner who easily forgets things that don't have a graphic or other stimulus). Let's face it, when you start talking about a bunch of 1's and 0's running around inside of computer or across a network wire, that's a little hard to relate to without something tangible. I'm studying for MCSE, and I use this as a reference source to clarify voids in my training manuals. This resource has crystalized many things which were just "vapor" until Bisaillon/Werner. Again, the graphics, supplemented by understandable text, is the answer. I'd highly recommend this to any person seeking better understanding of the subject without being overly technical. Finally, I might add, so many of these computer related books/manuals are loaded with typo's, spelling and punctuation errors, poor grammar, and outright mistakes; but NOT this one. I haven't read the book cover-to-cover, but I also haven't noticed any mistakes. That's refreshing! My hat is off to the authors for a such a superb job!

This book is incredible. It has all the information you could hope for on subjects rarely found in the same place. Everything is up-to-date and highly accurate. Technologies like Analog, T1/E1, T3/E3, SS7, Frame Relay, DSL, ISDN, ATM, Cable, SMDS, and SONET come to life in an easy-to-understand fashion. After reading this book with its chapter skill checks, you could easily pass for a guru on the subject.

This is truly the best overall book I have read on the industry. The technical material is unsurpassed! Great job to the authors!!

CISCO this time it publishes a book from the most basic thing analyzing the digital analogical conversion and the digital conversion to analogical in a concrete way.
Excellent the content of ISDN and ATM.
Although the term Telecommunications is generally associated to the telephony, maybe the book suffers of covering the Telephony IP. The book invites to publish a more advanced edition where it covers aspects of digital coding and digital criptography, SSL and SET; however the book is excellent to take it like fundamental reference in the telecommunications.
What should be established, is the necessity to create a standard or pattern among the topics that it should cover a book of telecommunications and CISCO guessed right in this point.
Other topics that they deserve attention in the book they are the cutleries for the protocol Frame Relay and the technology DSL.

Every time the name Cisco comes up in technical certification talk most people automatically think routers and switches but the company has a whole lot more including telecommunications.

In this book you'll find the most detailed explanation of the telecommunications I have seen thus far. The authors are extremely knowledgeable in this subject matter and the end result is this 600 plus page reference manual, that would be a must have for anyone who is working with data communication or high end networks.

Their breakdown of analog to digital conversion is well organized and technically accurate. I also was impressed by the amount of information included on the T, E and R carriers. Also included is discussion about ISDN, both BRI and PRI, frame relay, ATM, DSL, CABLE, SONET and for the first time I have ever seen SMDS.

Throughout the entire text you'll find helpful hints and tips, screen shots of actual routers or other equipment as well as a number of diagrams and figures, which give a visual aide to learning. The material is written to a higher level of understanding and you need to understand certain concepts before proceeding, but overall just about anyone in the industry will be able to benefit from this book.

Finally I found this book to be a useful add-on to study for several exams, some outside of the Cisco arena, including Network+, CCNA, CCDA, Server+ and Security+. Cisco Press is a proven leader in the high end networking.

Traffic Engineering and QoS Optimization of Integrated Voice & Data Networks (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)

Jerry Ash is a well known expert in the field and managed to provide a thorough and comprehensive analysis on QoS and Traffic Engineering. The reader will undoubtedly find in this book a large amount of valuable information illustrated by case studies. A recommended reading for anyone interested in QoS & Traffic Engineering.

Jerry Ash draws on his long history at the forefront of research and development in traffic engineering and network planning to provide a comprehensive view of how traffic engineering and network optimization can be applied to provide quality of service in today's networks. Drawing on lessons from the past, he provides a thorough overview and worked examples for modern integrated networks.

This is an important read for anyone serious about studying the topic.

This is an very important book describing a comprehensive coherent vision of a converged network infrastructure (architecture and protocols) for the Next Generation Network (NGN) along with large scale case studies for the AT&T converged network using discrete event simulation, and other dimensioning tools developed by the author and his colleagues over the past two decades at AT&T. The author Dr Gerald Ash has pioneered the implementation of dynamic routing methods within AT&T and WIN over the past two decades and is a leading authority in this area. He has now turned his attention to extending these highly successful techniques to the Next Generation Network (NGN) where all communication and communication services are supported on a converged infrastructure. Dr Ash has been a tireless contributor to a number of standards bodies (ITU-T, ATM Forum and IETF). This direct experience places him in a unique position to assess the challenges of network convergence and indeed he has already removed potential obstacles to his vision of the NGN by participating in the necessary Traffic Engineering extensions to RSVP, LDP etc. This document advances an important class of evolution possibilities, namely for an IP/(G)MPLS/DWDM protocol stack in greater depth and scope than other proposals made to date. It is very timely in that we are now at a crossroads where there are various alternative visions extant indicating how the Internet could or should evolve. The articulation of a comprehensive coherent vision of the NGN and its evaluation is a monumental task and for this Dr Ash deserves commendation. It is made difficult not only because of technical challenges but also because of the divergent cultures humorously represented by the Bellhead/Nethead caricatures.

Dr. Lorne G. Mason,
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
McGill University
Montreal Quebec. Canada

This is well written book that easy to understand for knowing basic algorithms and design techniques for VLSI design. Authors have presented the material in formal yet simple language that makes it a god book for senior undergraduates and starters in VLSI CAD.

A nice book, infact one of the best in the field, they give good review of the available research in the area. Good for undergraduate as well as post graduates. When you read it you feel as if the author was standing and explaining the material. Good work Sait !!

Since this book was published in 1997, a lot has happend in the area of physical design automation--but this is still a remarkably good text, especially for students and beginners. This because not only is it exceedingly clearly written, it concentraits on classic techniques which form the foundation for techniques still used today.

What is urgently needed is a bang-up-to-date text on this subject which contains materials for the more advanced user--not just for students, but also for old salts like myself who have been working in the trenches for 10 years! If such a text were to be written by these authors, I'm sure it would be a classic.

Sadly, EDA industry is a very small and shrinking industry, and a book like this is HARD to write, because you have to be an expert in so many fields. So this book is probably as good as we can reasonably expect to see anytime soon.

I have read most of the book and implemented most of the propsed algorithms. It was easy to understend. The authors simplified much of the notations that is used by the oirignal writers of the algorithms. It opens the area for any one intersted in those topics to continue research with an open mind about what to choose and how.