Book Review: Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours (5th Edition)

Author: Joe Casad
Format: Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Sams; 5th edition (November 4, 2011)
ISBN-10: 0672335719
ISBN-13: 978-067233571

I've been spending a lot of time with TCP/IP and particularly IPv6 in the past few months (I can't tell you why right now, but soon). When I saw Joe Casad's book Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours was in its fifth edition, I wondered how it compared to my experiences in researching various aspects of internetworking. One way to find out for sure is to request a review copy from the publisher, so here I am and here it is.

I'm a big fan of the "Sams Teach Yourself" books. I've had good experiences with them in the past and they usually offer just the right amount of learning, broken up into correctly sized bites. They also usually build one "hour" upon another so that by the end of the book, you really have learned something. There is no "who is this book for" section in the front matter, but this series is typically tailored for the beginner. How much of a beginner do you have to be? The first hour is called "What Is TCP/IP?". The first questions asked are, "What is a protocol?" and "What is a network?". Pretty basic stuff.

This series is designed, as I'm sure you guessed, to be a learning series. After the chapter's main content, there's a Q & A section and a Workshop section which is made up of a brief quiz (4 or 5 questions) and a short series of exercises. Appendix A in the back has all the answers, so you can check your work or have a peek if you really get stuck. Just for giggles, I went through the Workshop section of Chapter 14: TCP/Utilities and it seems like it's pretty standard material, if you know much about networking. Questions have to do with what commands you would use to view a computer's ARP cache or to see which hosts have made TCP connections to your computer (this all assumes a Windows PC) and exercises focused on ipconfig and ping. Not super challenging, but if the goal is to teach a networking newbie, this is at the right level.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that only one "hour" was dedicated to IPv6 (Hour 13) or that there were Exercises assigned to this chapter, but no answers for them in the Appendix. There are two good reasons for this. One is that a newbie will have their hands full with IPv4 and the other is that most folks still consider IPv6 really new (the "newness" is an illusion as IPv6 standards have been developing for years and many ISPs have accelerating their adoption of the next version of IP recently). The downside to this "neglect" in the book is that newbies are the perfect audience to learn IPv6 from scratch, at least at the level of concept. If you've got a couple of Windows 7 computers, you can ping their IPv6 addresses or ping your own localhost address (ping ::1).

On the up side, this TCP/IP book covers a lot more than TCP/IP at the level of the protocol including DNS, Routing, SOAP, Email, and "the Cloud". That sounds impressive and from the neophyte's perspective it is. However, because the book is addressed to the beginner, that's about as deep as you go into any of these topics. To be fair, that's a deep as this book should go, but that also means if you have any networking experience at all and you don't need a ground-level review, this book will be too light for you.

If you are a person who wants to learn basic networking (not particularly for how to set up two or three computers for wired/wifi in your home) with an eye on something a little more advanced like CompTIA's Network+ and a little later on Cisco's CCNA, then Casad's book will certainly give you a leg up. If that's where you are or where you want to go, I'd recommend Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours. If you have some experience and are looking for a book with more "meat" to it, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Addendum, 12-26-2011: Regarding IPv6 deployment, I just found this article at InfoWorld: IPv6 due for wide deployment in 2012, experts say

Review: DNS & BIND on IPv6

Author: Cricket Liu
Format: Paperback, 52 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media (May 27, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1449305199
ISBN-13: 978-1449305192

I have a relationship with a number of publishers whereby I can request review copies of their books and then, after going through them, write my reviews. This is a perfectly normal transaction and a win-win for both the reviewer and the publisher. The publisher gets some free marketing and the reviewer gets a book.

I requested Cricket Liu's DNS & BIND on IPv6 from O'Reilly...twice, along with several other titles. They never came and never came and never came, which is unusual, especially after they told me they'd sent the package twice.

Ordinarily, I would have moved on, but I really have an interest in IPv6 and Liu is the DNS and BIND guru, so I did something I normally wouldn't have done. I bought the book. I had a gift certificate so technically, I wasn't out-of-pocket, but a little less than $30.00 for 52 pages is still a tad spendy (as you can tell, I live on a budget).

All that aside, when the book came, I tore into it with a passion.

Liu's book, and a number of other similar "thin books" being put out by O'Reilly are really more of an appendix to larger tomes. Just imagine the content of DNS & BIND on IPv6 fitting into the back pages of DNS and BIND 5th Ed. (2006). I can imagine when the 6th edition is published, the IPv6 book content will be folded in, but that's just my wishful thinking.

Don't expect a lot of background from the IPv6 book. It assumes that you are well versed in DNS and BIND and don't need a lot of hand holding. In fact, you are expected to know a fair amount about how IPv6 works before beginning to read as well. The "background to IPv6" part of the book is barely a page long, then you launch right into IPv6 forward and reverse mapping.

If you are a DNS administrator and just need to understand how IPv6 figures into your job, this book is a good introduction. Like the other books in this series (last August, I reviewed Migrating Applications to IPv6 which is only 50 pages), the limited page count allows the reader only a taste of the topic at hand. You're not going to dig very deep (slight pun there for dig fans). Actually, a certain amount of the content can be traced back to RFC 1886 which is the IETF documentation for DNS Extensions to support IP version 6.

I was just a little disappointed that Liu didn't mention that RFC 1886 has been obsoleted by RFC 3596, especially since the latter RFC was released eight years ago. It may not have made any difference in how he wrote the book, but keeping up with standards is the lifeblood of understanding IPv6 implementation.

Still, the book doesn't disappoint as long as you keep the intended audience and scope in mind. If you're a DNS/BIND administrator and you need a brief ramp up on IPv6 and name resolution, Liu's book is the source to check out.

Migrating Applications to IPv6: A Review

Paperback: 50 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media (July 7, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1449307876
ISBN-13: 978-1449307875

This wasn't what I expected.

I have an interest in migration from IPv4 to IPv6 for reasons I can't really explain right now, but I thought that reviewing Dan York's book Migrating Applications to IPv6 would hone my thinking and expose me to a different way of looking at IPv6. After all, most of us think of implementing IPv6 on an internetwork. We think of the expanded IP address space and the changes in DNS records, how routing mechanisms will change in IPv6 implementations and so on. We don't really think about how the change will affect applications. You might not have thought that IPv6 would change anything about how you write applications. Dan York's book gets you to think again.

But in only 40 pages?

Actually, the content of the book is only 34 pages. That's like a short chapter in just about any other IT book I've ever read or reviewed. Something made me decide to check around at other books on IPv6 recently published by O'Reilly. There's a trend.

Cricket Liu is something of a mainstay at O'Reilly in terms of her DNS and BIND book (in its 5th edition as of June 2006). Her DNS and BIND on IPv6 book was published at the end of May this year. It's only 52 pages long with about 37 pages being actual content. Planning for IPv6 by Silvia Hagen will be published at the end of August and it's a total of 82 pages long. If you put these three books together, you might have the start of an actual IPv6 book based on the most recent IETF RFCs for IPv6 implementation, but I'd certainly expect more to round out the subject.

Each of these three books runs a little over $25.00 each, but you could also buy Hagen's IPv6 Essentials book (published in 2006), with a full 448 pages of information, for only about ten dollars more. I looked through the front matter of York's book trying to find some reason for it's "mini-format". I couldn't find anything. I've never seen a complete book from O'Reilly before that was so thin on content. I had expected an in-depth treatment of the topic but what I found was a "pamphlet" of introductory ideas, tips, and tricks.

York's book does address, in a very compressed space, a number of issues that you will need to consider as an applications developer, and they all have to do with how your application accepts, manages, and stores IP addresses and DNS records. If your app requires that an IP address be input, does it do so allowing enough space for IPv6 addresses? If your app manages DNS records, will it be able to accomodate both A and AAAA records (IPv4 and IPv6 respectively)? Does your app expose any APIs that have an IP address format dependency? As a developer, if you haven't asked yourself those questions before, this book will help you find the answers.

Is the information in this book useful? Yes. I found the content, what there was of it, well written, insightful, and knowledgable. Is it worth 25 bucks? That's hard to say. If I wanted information on application migration, DNS and BIND, and general IPv4 to IPv6 migration planning, would I pay over $75.00 (for the three books I just mentioned) for a total page count of only 174 pages, no matter how well written or useful, when a full-sized book of almost 450 pages is less than half that cost?

Sorry, but I'm having a tough time trying to figure out what O'Reilly's strategy is here. When I requested a review copy of York's book from O'Reilly, I didn't give the page count a single thought. Now, it's all I can think about.

What happened, O'Reilly?