Data Communications Books

This book give a very good introduction to CGI/perl, while including some relatively advanced examples.

Robert speaks in very plain, down to earth language. I don't feel like I am being spoken down to. He is simply brilliant!!!! He has some pretty real world utilities that he spells out in a VERY easy to use fashion. This book is a must have for anybody who maintains an Internet server

The book is a product of a very logical mind , written with remarkable pedagogical talent.
(Or remarkable pedagogical training...).
A worthy reading for anybody who makes a living in IT .
A compulsory reading for anybody who's in Infrastructure Support (LAN/WAN) because it gives you a very clear overview on what "the others" are doing or dealing with...
I wish this book was available years ago; would have made me a better professional.
I wouldn't be surprised if it'll be embraced as Academic Material by some Universities.

Cisco is a leader in the internet infrastructure, Cisco is also a proven leader in knowing how to integrate the WWW with business and provide a solution for their customers. Now they produce the study guide for the CISS exam and become a proven leader their as well.

In over 750 pages the author starts the certification journey with business application models, followed quickly with discussions for design and application requirements, after that you move to learning about Internet business solutions including 4 scenarios.

There are also several other scenarios in the book as well as 5 CISS case studies ranging from e-business to security. There is also 2 practice exams included, 1 for the CISS Applications and 1 for the CISS Solutions exams.

Overall I found the book a very good read and very well documented, the author has certainly given you a first class effort with this one.

The first volume for Cisco Network Admission Control series explains the architecture, design and components for NAC Framework. The second volume explains the production deployment as well as troubleshooting NAC Framework to build a self-defending network.

I found the second volume more helpful and practical as it provides technical configuration and implementation guidelines. The book is basically divided into four parts: NAC Framework solution Overview, Configuration Guidelines, Deployment Scenarios and finally Managing and Monitoring NAC.

I think that the first chapter is the most important as it explains the NAC Framework solution overview and the components needed to support it. It shows which Cisco network access devices and which Cat or Cisco IOS version support this feature. It explains the difference among NAC-L3-IP, NAC-L2-IP and NAC-L2-802.1X. The chapter includes Cisco online reference so readers can research each device in details and get the most up-to-date list of all Cisco NAC-enabled devices.

The next 11 chapters cover installation, configuration and brief troubleshooting tips for each component: Cisco Trust Agent, VPN Concentrator, ASA and PIX firewall, Cisco Security Agents and even some brief introductions for third party vendor appliances such as QualysGuard Scanner for audit servers.

The following 3 chapters describe the deployment scenario for NAC in small, medium and large businesses. These chapters offer 3 interesting scenarios but all of them are just recaps of configuration mentioned in previous chapters.

The last 2 chapters explain the NAC deployment best practices and NAC monitoring using Cisco CsMARS. The best practices provide guidelines to roll this NAC deployment successfully by completing a readiness assessment of the current infrastructure, identifying responsible party, building lab and test plans as well as tuning and post deployment monitoring. Having experiences in deploying security projects, I believe that they should also add organization security policy which is approved by top management for NAC deployment best practices. This policy will help to remove any major obstacles encountered from end users.

I found this book very helpful in explaining Cisco NAC Framework. The book is definitely not for beginners as understanding of Cisco configuration and familiarity with Cisco products are needed to understand this.

NAC Framework is not for everyone. If you run a Cisco centric shop with the latest hardware and software, this NAC Framework is for you to build the self-defending network on top of your Cisco network and host based IPS, firewall, 802.1X enabled network access devices and others. If not, a much simpler Cisco Clean Access or other third party NAC appliance can probably do the job with less complicated configuration and upfront investment.

The book does not mention anything about Cisco NAC Framework integration or configuration with the new Microsoft NAP (Network Access Protection) although Cisco has officially provided the plan to do this in its web site.

In conclusion, the author has provided a very concise and understandable reading with the few number of pages provided. Each chapter goes straight to the topics, explains in an easy to follow manner, provides a lot of configuration examples and screenshots and closes with online references.

I liked this book a lot and certainly will recommend others to read this. I gave the book five out of five stars.

It is generally believed that the biggest problems in network security come from the outside, but only sometimes is this true. The biggest loses tend to come from the inside. The people inside your company or organization know more about what there is to steal, how to create the most damage, and furthermore may feel that they have a direct reason to be angry and wanting to cause deliberate damage.

The second part of the problem is that todays organizations may have huge networks with many different areas to be protected from many different kinds of people, coming into the systems from many areas withing the organization including other facilities, suppliers, customers, remote salesmen, travelling executives, etc.

Cisco NAC Architecture and Design, the first volume in this series covers the protocols, design concepts, networking structure - in general the higher level preliminary setup of the NAC.

This volume covers the nuts and bolts of the actual installation and management of the Cisco NAC and the integration of the NAC into other Cisco components such as: VPN, ASA, PIX and more.

Cisco Unity Deployment and Solutions Guide is THE book to figure out how to make Unity work and how to properly deploy it.

Very helpful!!

In the beginning there was the telephone. Then there e-mail, and not long after came sophisticated voice messaging systems that replaced the simple answering machines. Then all of this kind of communications becan to converge. The combined communications capability became called Unified Messaging. Cisco's Unity server is the state-of-the-art in unified messaging systems. And this book seems destined to be the Unity Bible.

This book covers unity. Part I, about a quarter of the book is on the concepts and architecture of the of the Unity system. A good bit of the material in this section covers features that are not discussed anywhere else.

Part II, about a third of the book is on Deployment. Unity is a very flexible system. That means that the installer has many options to consider, and the use of these options involves tradeoffs.

Part III is on the ongoing management and administration of a Unity system. What tools, for instance, are available to monitor the performance of the system and how to interpret the results that these tools give you.

This is a textbook for my class. As i can learn nothing from the Prof, this book helps me out a lot!

It is good book to keep as reference. Excellent for people who are starting/interested/working on client server projects.

But why it is out of print?

Because this is a collection of papers by different authors, quality and style vary from chapter to chapter, but there are few wasted words, and hardly a sentence without a kernel idea worth taking the time to understand. On the other hand, it is a difficult and demanding book to read cover to cover, and most readers will probably prefer to focus on areas of particular personal interest rather than tackling the whole volume at one go.

Chapter 1, entitled "The origin of coarticulation", discusses what causes coarticulation, a history of the investigation of coarticulation, and how coarticulation develops in children¡¦s speech. A series of coarticulatory models is reviewed, including Lindblom's 'target undershoot' model of the 1960s (p. 16), Oehman's observation that two vowels interact with each other across intervening stops (p. 17), Wickelgren's idea that we store not phonemes in our brains but collections of context-sensitive allophones (p. 18), up to Keating's 'window' model of the 1980s (p. 21), in which every feature of a segment is associated with a range of values rather than an absolute target.

Part II is entitled "Research results: components of the motor system for speech". Each chapter features a key articulatory organ or organ complex: the velopharyngeal complex, the tongue, the larynx, the lips, and the lips and jaws.

Part III provides a home, under the catch-all classification of "Wider perspectives", for two chapters that did not quite fit elsewhere, "Cross-language studies on articulation" and "Implications for phonological theory".

The chapters of part IV, "Instrumental Techniques", report on the state of the art of various specialized methods and instruments for performing articulatory and acoustic measurements. The methods presented are: palatography, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound, electromagnetic articulography (EMMA), electromyography, transducers for investigating velopharyngeal function (including aerometry, electromyography, various acoustic methods, radiography, endoscopy, photodetection, various mechanical devices, ultrasound, MRI, and EMMA), and techniques for investigating laryngeal articulation (including fibreoptic endoscopy, transillumination, electromyography, pulse-echo ultrasound, acoustic analysis with inverse filtering, glottography, and the Sondhi tube).

The final chapter of the book addresses use of the spectrograph and other acoustic tools in studying coarticulatory phenomena. This chapter gives examples of how to do acoustic analysis of formant transitions, the stable portion of a vowel, stop release, fricative noise, nasals, liquids and glides, voicing and tone, and duration and intensity. This is a laudable beginning, but there is room for much more to be done in this area.

While this book is overall very tight in structure and rich in content, it is not by any means the do-all, end-all work on coarticulation. There are a number of areas not covered in this book that I would like to have seen, and hope to see in future works, such as: what really happens between *words* in running discourse?

This book is a good beginning of more serious and concentrated work on coarticulatory phenomena than has previously been seen. Hopefully many more such studies will follow.

This is an important book if you're interested in coarticulation, and if you are, you should definitely have it. Great chapters on a variety of topics, some of which present data, some of which talk about theoretical implications of data, and some of which talk about instrumental techniques for data-gathering.

"Comparing, Designing and Deploying VPNs" introduces various and the most popular VPN technologies, provides explanation on how to select the appropriate VPNs, as well as how to design and deploy them. The book shows each VPN technologies in details, their capabilities and configurations.

The book starts with defining what VPN is, explaining what various VPNs are available and their comparisons. The first chapter introduces a lot of acronyms such as VPWS, VPLS, L2TPv2/v3, AToM and others). It also provides a summary table of technical consideration for selecting each Site-to-Site VPN and Remote Access technologies and a flowchart of all VPN technologies. Both the tables and flowcharts are very useful for reference before progressing to the next chapters.

The book dedicates the next 6 chapters (about 500 pages!) explaining Site-to-Site VPNs starting from designing, deploying and configuring L2TPv3 based Layer 2 VPN, Any Transport over MPLS (AToM) based Layer 2 VPN, MPLS Layer 3 Site-to-Site VPN and Site-to-Site IPSecs VPN. It provides in-depth explanation on how each VPN operates, many elaborate configuration samples with explanation of each commands used, and some advanced designs and deployments.

The first 6 chapters also have the most typos. For instance, in a couple of page, the author refers to previous diagrams by providing the page number xx instead of the actual page number. However, all of these typos are minor and can be ignored.

The next 3 chapters focus on Remote Access VPNs. They cover the design and implementation of L2TPV2 and V3 remote access VPNS, IPSec remote access and finally SSL remote access (WebVPN). They provide several configuration examples on how to implement the remote access VPNs in several VPN gateways from IOS routers, VPN 3000 Series Concentrators, and the new Cisco ASA 5500 series appliance.

The book assumes that the readers already have an extensive knowledge of IGP routing protocols (RIP, EIGRP, ISIS, OSPF), Quality of Service (QoS) and especially BGP. Without knowing them, readers will find difficulties in understanding the examples given as the book uses them extensively. I recommend readers to read Jeff Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 Second Edition" and "Routing TCP/IP volume 2 as well to understand IGP and BGP routing protocols in-depth.

I liked this book a lot and certainly will recommend others to read this. I gave the book five out of five stars for its good explanations, configuration and examples. The book is very technical but well written and provides a lot of examples that can be well understood. Since this is a CiscoPress release book, all of the hardware design and configuration are based on Cisco equipments.

The book has helped me greatly in understanding the different flavors of VPNs available. The IPSec VPN and Remote Access VPN chapters alone are very useful for the VPN project I am currently involved with and they already justify the purchase of this book.

Mark Lewis, the author, is a CCIE who has real work experiences in Service Provider VPN technologies. I also recommend his other book "Troubleshooting Virtual Private Networks (VPN)".

You would think that a VPN should be a fairly simple thing. But of course it isn't. Over a surprisingly short time various companies, groups of companies, standards organizations and seemingly anyone who wants to can come up with a new set of initials to define something special. Just a few examples include: GRE. AToM, Q-in-Q, MPLS LSP, L2F, PPTP. And of course they all mean something that is just a little bit different. This book starts out defining all these and more.

The second part of the book covers site-to-site VPNs. This part has six chapters, and basically each chapter talks about designing and deploying different types of VPNs. The third part of the book is on Remote Access VPNs, covering situations like the telecommuting worker or the salesman out on the road.

This book is by Cisco press so, as you might expect, it concentrates on the use of Cisco equipment. This is not unreasonable as Cisco produces a lot of VPN equipment. Also as you would expect from a Cisco title, the information is complete and accurate. In this book it is also very well written in a language that can be understood. All in all, quite a good book

I found this book to be practical and well written. It had a strong section on IVR, including a good discussion on application generators. CTI was covered, as well as standards and typical business uses. The call center reporting chapter was a little weak but the other chapters on VoIP, telephony implementation, call accounting and security overcame this limitation. Also, I like the author's writing style. He stays focused on the topic and makes good use of the book real estate.

A re-organization in our company placed telecom services under the Administration Department. Not having a technical background, I was a bit concerned about my new operational and technical responsibilities. The world of Communications always seemed so complicated.

I found this book to be right on target. The concepts of CTI, Unified Messaging and especially implementation of telephony systems were clearly explained and logical. An unexpected chapter on cost management was extremely valuable in Operations. This is not a programming book but a very helpful resource to an individual making decisions on CTI/Telephony systems. There are plenty of examples and illustrations from real systems. The best part is that it was written in plain, easy-to-understand English. I tried to read telecommunications books many times but they were so technical they proved to be a great cure for insomnia.

This book covers traditional Telephony basics, security, management tools and even has an outline for an RFP for PBX and Voice Mail systems. It gives a view of tomorrow's technology providing negatives as well as the positives of new technology such as Voice over IP.

The only negative is that I wish the book were a little longer.

The anecdotes, tone, and structure of this book make it both an extremely pleasurable experience as well as an invaluable learning tool. As the CT industry starts to take off, and my company solidifies our strategy on how to proceed in this business, you can bet that Computer Telephony Strategies will play a major part in helping us to make the best informed decisions.

This book provides a holistic overview of computer telephony and the elements that comprise this technology. It introduces IT and management information system people, network managers, network engineers, PC owners to the wonders of the computer telephony. And business that considers the telephone as the life-blood of its company needs to invest in CT education. Many sections of this book are aimed at IT specialists, information officers, business planners, and network engineers. A major objective in writing this book was to create a place for the computer telephony guru in the work force of the IT department. This book also provides IT staff with an understanding of some of the business issues of which they need to be aware. As a CTI engineer I found the book to be an in depth analysis in definition of terms and laying out of concepts of computer telephony, computer-Telephone integration, the devices involved and their special features, the rage of telephony services, along with a full description of the impact of computer telephony implementation on the corporate culture and other social implications. The book is truly refreshing for someone who is looking for in-depth analysis into this subject matter. I enjoyed the book and would highly recommed it for the cti engineer, cti manager, and cti integration analyst.

Can someone tell me about this book. Interested in finding information on conducting online meetings

This book is based on extensive studies of the effects of computer-based communication technology - e-mail, distribution lists, bulletin boards, and computer conferences - through field research as well as social and psychological experiments. Sproull and Kiesler, both I believe trained as experimental social psychologists, believe that computer-based communication is radically changing the ways people interact with one another, much like nineteenth century communications technologies as the telephone, typewriter, and railroad transformed social and business lifestyles. With new computer-based communications, the authors argue, organizations are becoming more flexible and fluid, people increasingly think of themselves as part of the larger organization as opposed to mere members of a single department, and managers are working more democratically with employees.

The early work of this book was basic research on groups, especially on the topics of group dynamics, communication, and decision making. When Reagan was elected president, Kiesler had just come to C.M.U. and the N.S.F. held up her grant on standards setting groups. So, for fun, she began to explore computer networks, the experiments of which "revealed many interesting phenomena, which we eventually wrote about in books and articles--on flaming, electronic group dynamics, changes in decision making and employee participation, and new kinds of teamwork." Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, summarizes that research.